Introduction: Legacies

Notes Introduction: Legacies 1. I have coined this term as an echo to George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Bardolators’ (the ones who worship or idolise Shakespeare in a quasi- religious manner) to be found in the ‘Preface’ of his 1901 Three Plays for Puritans. 2. On the market value of Woolf’s name and face, see Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon 8– 10. 3. On Woolf’s rise to a household- name status, see Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon 102– 6. 4. Many active academic societies in the United States, Great Britain, France, Japan and Korea, and international scholarly journals such as Woolf Studies Annual and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany are devoted to the study of Virginia Woolf’s life, work, influences and milieu. 5. Woolf scholarship has expanded to include a great variety of interests and foci: historical and cultural studies; feminist and gender studies; postcolonial studies; language and genre studies; influence and intertextuality; modernism and postmodernism; work on manuscripts and variant editions. See Snaith. 6. Whitworth contends that ‘by the late 1990s Mrs Dalloway has displaced To the Lighthouse as the most significant work in Woolf’s oeuvre; and if not that, certainly as the work most attractive to creative interpreters’ (217). 7. The question of survival of only a few chosen books is voiced by Cunningham’s character, Richard Brown, who muses in The Hours: ‘There are, after all, so many books. Some of them, a handful, are good, and of that handful, only a few survive’ (225). 8. On 26 July 1922, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’ (Diary 2: 186). 9. Ryan talks about ‘the sense of the pastness that pervades postmodern culture’ (386). 10. For the lexical spectrum related to the word ‘rewriting’, see Moraru, Rewriting 3– 21. After reviewing definitions from different theoretical perspectives (philological, historical, psychoanalytical, poststructuralist, anthropologi- cal), Moraru concludes that rewriting is not a literary genre, but an ‘archigenre’ or ‘hybrid practice’, an intertextual and ‘ inter- discursive’ phenomenon (19). On definitions of ‘rewriting’, see also Rebei 45. The critic examines different meanings and concludes that rewriting ‘carries out two functions: one is that of writing the text again through a new inscription – thus remaking it and devising it anew – and the other is that of writing back to the original text’. 11. Since Antiquity, rewriting has been a ‘“motor” of literary history in the West’ (Moraru, Rewriting 7). This old phenomenon started with the Bible, and continued with Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, Eliot and 214 Notes to Introduction 215 so on, but the current postmodernist attitude consists in playing with the technique itself, using metafiction to reflect on it, devising and combining more sophisticated uses of pastiche, quotation, parody and other operations of textual transformation. 12. Several critics have addressed essential questions about the nature of rewriting as a distinctive feature of postmodernism, as a form of intertextuality, and as a proper genre. See Moraru, Rewriting 10– 21 and Bertens et al., eds, ‘Renovations and Innovations’, in International Postmodernism 177– 81. 13. I am here alluding to the title of Hillel Schwartz’s book, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles. 14. For Yarbrough, rewriting is a special form of ‘cultural recycling’ (60). 15. Moraru contends that postmodern discourses ‘are reprised, “remembered” and thus reenacted but not without alteration, as postmodernism spins its own stories, memoriously’ (Memorious 9, original emphasis). 16. In his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T. S. Eliot contends that ‘the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ (15). For him, the poet must innovate while keeping an eye on what was written before and contribute to the value of earlier works. 17. Theories of influence have been voiced by many critics, among them T. S. Eliot (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’), Harold Bloom (The Anatomy of Influence, The Anxiety of Influence) and Walter Jackson Bate (The Burden of the Past and the English Poet). Eliot proposes a pattern of influence that focuses on how the work of an individual writer fits within the preceding tradition, while Bloom proposes a pattern of influence that emphasises how the work of a later writer (usually a poet) surpasses the work of his precursors. While Eliot suggests continuity in the poetic tradition, Bloom argues for an attempted rupture. Eliot advocates a poet’s participation in and respect for the tradition. Conversely, Bloom has a revisionary view of poetry that privi- leges the individual who swerves away from the work of his predecessors. Both Bloom and Bate discuss the writer’s struggle with great writers who came before him and the effects of the illustrious predecessors on the writer’s creativity. A poet experiences Oedipal anxiety, that is to say a simultaneous need to imitate and to displace prior poets. In order to create his own work, he must surpass his father figure by revising him. Bloom’s Anxiety argues that a writer/newcomer (ephebe) feels a sense of anxiety when faced with the monumental, seemingly unsurpassable work of his precursor. ‘Strong’ poets must struggle against the overwhelming influence of their predecessors. The artist feels the pressure of being the successor of a great poet and experiences difficulties of being original when writing in the shadow of influential poets, which leads to a ‘loss of self- confidence’ for the successor ‘as he compares what he feels able to do with the rich heritage of the past art and literature’ (Bate 6– 7). For Bate, the cultural and literary legacy is regarded not as an asset, but as a burden, triggering an anxiety of influence. 18. The word tradition contains connotations of both continuity (inheritance handed down by a predecessor) and discontinuity (treason): ‘To traduce tradition is to affirm tradition: nothing is more traditional, in one sense of the word, than break of discontinuity, achieved by an act of treason’ (Pérez Firmat xvii). 216 Notes to Introduction 19. This idea is expressed by Borges in his 1941 short story ‘The Library of Babel’ when he states the ‘certainty that everything has already been written’ (470) or by Barth who speaks of the literature of our times as ‘the literature of exhaustion’: for him, a literary text can be nothing but an imitation of another literary text. 20. For a synthetic criticism of the current rewriting phenomenon, see Moraru, Rewriting 7. 21. Eliot was equally acutely aware of the pressures on the artist as a successor of a great poet who has seemingly created an art that excludes the possibility of originality in their heirs. ‘Not only’, Eliot argued, ‘every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors’ (‘What is a Classic’ 66). 22. Raymond Federman’s play- word in his 1976 novel Take It or Leave It. 23. In Anxiety, Bloom enumerates six revisionary ratios (clinamen, tessera, keno- sis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades) whereby the later poet, in order to become a great or canonical poet, travels through six phases in which s/he imitates, challenges, revises and eventually embraces his/her precursor by opening his/her work to that of the predecessor’s. During these phases of apprenticeship, the poet accepts and absorbs the precursor’s work and thus becomes a ‘strong’ poet (Bate 80), that is to say a canonical poet whose work stands the test of time. 24. I am here alluding to Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 25. See Genette’s argument that hypertextuality has the merit of bringing prior texts into a new circuit of meaning (Palimpsests 400). 26. See Cowart, Literary Symbiosis, in which the critic discusses recent trends in retelling that have made the act of borrowing more explicit, less veiled, and examines writers who ‘attach’ themselves to their sources in a symbiotic relationship that transforms ‘the monuments of literary history’ and makes them new. This generates a host– guest relationship between the two texts, which is an equivalent of Genette’s hypotext– hypertext bond. 27. This partial quote is taken from Woolf’s Between the Acts. My title here simply means that the authors I am considering in this book follow in their fore- runner’s footsteps. With Mrs Dalloway, Woolf broke the ice of conventional writing, has paved the way and opened new artistic possibilities for her successors. 28. According to Genette in his seminal study Palimpsests, hypertextuality is one of the five subcategories of transtextuality along with intertextuality, para- textuality, architextuality and metatextuality. Hypertextuality refers to any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary. Text B can evoke text A without necessarily mentioning it directly and can transform, modify, elaborate or extend text A by using various tools such as parody, spoof, sequel, translation and so on. 29. Artistic movements and trends are usually seen as competing for some time and eventually replacing and succeeding each other. Thus, postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s (see especially Huyssen 188). Since then, postmodernism Notes to Introduction 217 has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture and philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels (see especially Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 3– 21 and McHale), a metaphysical scepticism towards grand narratives of Western culture (see especially Lyotard), ontological interrogations and fundamen- tal questionings of what the ‘real’ constitutes (see especially Baudrillard, Simulacra).

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