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Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority Timothy Vincent

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Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority Timothy Vincent Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2005 Moments of Seeing: Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority Timothy Vincent Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Vincent, T. (2005). Moments of Seeing: Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1313 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Moments of Seeing: Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Timothy C. Vincent May 5, 2005 Timothy C. Vincent Moments of Seeing: Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority Doctor of Philosophy in English May 5, 2005 APPROVED: __________________________________________________ Dr. Linda A. Kinnahan, Director Professor of English APPROVED: __________________________________________________ Dr. Magali Cornier Michael, First Reader Associate Professor of English APPROVED: __________________________________________________ Dr. Daniel P. Watkins, Second Reader Professor of English APPROVED: __________________________________________________ Dr. Linda A. Kinnahan Chair, Department of English APPROVED: __________________________________________________ Francesco Cesareo, Ph.D., Dean McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts ii Moments of Seeing: Woolf, Lewis, and Modernist Exteriority Timothy C. Vincent Contents Preface iv Introduction 1 From Sympathy to Empathy: Subject/Object Relations from Romanticism to Modernism 12 In the Shadow of Roger Fry: Woolf, Lewis, and Post-Impressionism 61 The Painterly Eye: Woolf, Lewis, and the Perceptual Self 108 The Site of Conflict: Woolf, Lewis, and the Politics of Visual Aesthetics 161 Summary 214 Notes 222 Illustrations 230 Works Cited 236 iii Preface The idea for this dissertation began to take shape with an essay that I wrote for a journal called Interdisciplinary Humanities (16.1) and that was based on my first serious exposure to Woolf, Lewis, and modernist aesthetics in the summer of 1997. I attended a seminar on British modernism at Cambridge that included an intensive study of the London art scene in the years before World War I, and I could not get the paintings and literature out of my head. This experience was followed by an NEH grant for more modernist study at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in the summer of 1999. When the opportunity of a full-year sabbatical presented itself in 2001, I jumped at it and returned to graduate school with a new focus and renewed energy. This is where the Duquesne University English Department entered the picture. I will never be able to express adequately my gratitude for the interest in me and my work, the friendship of fellow students and faculty, and the revitalization of my career that the Duquesne English Department has given me. I am especially grateful to my dissertation director, Dr. Linda Kinnahan, for her thoughtful guidance and support, and I deeply appreciate the help and advice I received throughout the examination and dissertation process from Dr. Wallace Watson, Dr. Dan Watkins, and especially Dr. Magali Cornier Michael, who was the first to encourage me to apply for the graduate program. I also have received much encouragement and support from my colleagues in the English Department at Shady Side Academy, my loving sister, Karen Vincent, and my wife Liz, son Chet, and daughter Leslie. I could not have completed this project without their unfailing faith in me. Finally, I would like to dedicate this project to the memory of my beloved brother, Raymond Leo Vincent, Jr., whose love for the arts was an inspiration to me and many others. iv Introduction This study investigates the role of exteriority in a reconciliation of Bergsonian subjectivity with the valorization of the object in modernism, which often seem to be at odds with one another. Such a reconciliation involves the resolution of a commonly perceived point of contention between the work of Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis: the notion that Woolf’s famous “moments of being” are utterly at odds with Lewis’s famous “philosophy of the eye” and that the well-documented modernist “discovery” of the interior irrevocably divides the aesthetics and artistry of these two modernist giants. Chapter One traces the transition of the subject/object relationship from romanticism to modernism, revealing how a major perceptual shift from the romantic emphasis on sympathetic identification with the object to the modernist empathetic identification with it underscored the visual aesthetic of modernism that was central to the period as well as to the work of Woolf and Lewis. Chapter Two demonstrates how, through the influence of Bergson, Moore, and Roger Fry in particular, the early work of Woolf and Lewis shares an interest in the privileging of the visual over the verbal, the use of formalist techniques, and a deep fascination with the strangeness of the object. Focusing on Cézanne’s concept of réalisation that was so central to Fry and his followers, Chapter Three explores the ways in which the work of Woolf and Lewis is closely connected to Cézanne’s attempt to “realize” optic awareness of the object and perceptual awareness of it at the same time. This places both writers closer to a subjective position that stresses the imagination’s powerful capacity to transform the immanent realm rather than identify with it, which Lewis felt was the worst influence of 1 Bergsonian subjectivity on modernity itself. Finally, Chapter Four reveals that, although both Woolf and Lewis continued to view the object as an essential restorative for the verbal, after 1913 they and the circles they moved in went their separate ways in the application of a common set of influences, adopting vastly different views on aesthetic, social, and political issues. T.E. Hulme’s version of anti-vitalism, for instance, took Lewis’s interest in the object in a different direction from Woolf, who more and more influenced by Bloomsbury pacificism and feminist issues between the Wars. And the influence of Ezra Pound, right-wing politics and WWI, not to mention misogyny, homophobia, and class resentment, definitely separate Lewis from Woolf and Bloomsbury. If it is true, then, that the visual freshens up subjective experience with the immanent realm, along with what Fredric Jameson has called the “automatic meaning- effects of the stale verbal conventions of the cultural symbolic order”(74), the final question of Chapter Four becomes, “Freshens them up to what?” The attempt to locate some common ground in the aesthetics of Woolf and Lewis provides not only a greater understanding of their respective careers but a greater understanding of the points of cooperation, collaboration, and conflict that occurred within a remarkably small collection of creative and intellectual talent associated with British modernism. Despite the differences that distinguish the personal lives and careers of Woolf and Lewis, for both of them the object, the visual image, or what this study calls exteriority, retains the power to “make it new,” a phrase often associated with the modernist project, but with an important difference in this case. Pound’s imagism emphasizes the strict avoidance of all clichéd expressions and calls for the substitution of concrete images for verbal narrative. Woolf and Lewis, on the other hand, create and make use of a tension 2 between clichéd verbal narrative and the visual image that disrupts the verbal. The reader (and viewer in the case of Lewis’s visual art) is made aware of the presence of both, and the resulting effect is a dialogical relationship between visual image and verbal convention, in contrast to Pound’s attempt to use the image to move beyond earlier verbal representations. Woolf and Lewis join other modernists in their interest in the perceptual freshness to be found in the object, but they are both distinguished by what Jameson calls “the thoroughly relativized position of the painter” (126), which is located more between the verbal and visual, seeking to establish a clear and unambiguous space for itself, but always aware of the vexed nature of such a position. This aesthetic position finds much of its origins for both Woolf and Lewis in G.E. Moore’s insistence on the ontological separation of the object from consciousness and in the growing modernist opposition to turn-of-the-century idealism found in F.H. Bradley’s basic contention that the object is contained in the subject. In contrast to Bradley, Moore’s separation of object from subject had an enormous influence on the aesthetics and artistic production of Bloomsbury, and this study attempts to show that the entire period was deeply influenced by Moore’s thought, which, as Douglas Mao points out, “begins with a sense of the sheer strangeness of the object world”(53). Such strangeness serves to reinvigorate, to defamiliarize, to restore or replace the verbal conventions or cultural dead wood of an earlier era, which, for both Woolf and Lewis, was the Victorian past, even though Lewis often criticized Bloomsbury for what he believed was their continuance of it. The past, however, plays an important role in the verbal/visual relationship, since an acute awareness of the past is necessary for an understanding of how the verbal/visual relationship is reinventing it. 3 What distinguishes this study from other scholarly considerations is its bringing together of two such different figures as Woolf and Lewis in their deep understanding of the relationship between the visual and the verbal, thereby establishing a deeper connection between the sister arts of painting and writing that were in such great dialogue in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
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