Stories About "Nothing"

To really get into this week's Woolf, I feel that a meditative, Zen-like, haiku-appreciating state of mind is helpful to navigate the short stories' startling images and labyrinthine sentences. For example, in the first sentence:

"From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom..."

I found it at first difficult to navigate between subjects and their adjectival descriptors, a difficulty increased by the passive-voice construction in the first line. This phenomenon, however, I find to be far-from-accidental on Woolf's part, particularly given her pun on "rose" in the first verb. This word choice creates a dualistic parallel in the audience's mind, of both the rose flowers that may be blooming in "Kew Garden" and the plants' action of life and growth. Sandra Kemp states of Woolf's short stories that "time, space, and the habitual association of things are erased by this potential of the imagination"; likewise, I find that the dichotomy between "thing" and "action," or "subject" and "being," to be playfully blurred here.

Perhaps this strategy lends the sense of timelessness many sections of both "Kew Gardens" and "Mark on the Wall" contain. There is no traditional narrative with its linear progression of time in either story, but the narrative instead switches back and forth between past, present, and perhaps even future. "Kew Gardens" shifts between the present and a memory of "fifteen years ago," in which what is ostensibly marginal, unrelated background detail reigns over the bulk of the actual occurrence (40). Simon mainly recalls a "dragonfly" circling and the impatient motion of a shoe rather than, say, his lover's words or facial expression as per conventional expectations. Woolf here captures the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind, particularly, as Kemp notes, in regards to recollections (68) -- we often remember the past as a snapshot, and indeed remember minute details while faces and words grow hazy and diluted. There seems to be a tension between the thoughts that relate to the social sphere, socially acceptable thoughts about the weather or events in the "Times" ("Unwritten Novel", 19) and those eccentric flashes of perception that constitute a large part of our waking lives and often lend them meaning. (People ask what I am thinking often, and my answer is always, always censored somehow.)

To return to "Kew Gardens," I am unsure how to "interpret" Simon's "perception" (Kemp, 76), if even that is what Woolf intends, that the "whole" of his beloved "seemed to be in her shoe" (40). There is a hint of Prufrock here, of the fragmentation of the human Self, and particularly men's fragmentation of female syntactic/literary "objects," or bodies. However, given Woolf's love affair with detail and imagery in her short stories, perhaps remembering another by their shoe is not an insult, but merely a method by which Woolf imaginatively penetrates an"other"'s mind. Perhaps transferring preferred body parts from hands to shoes is Woolf's way of playing with and subverting Eliot's device. Furthermore, Kemp seems to view the old woman's "kiss" as mocking R/romantic conventions, yet I thought of a matriarchal transference and blessing upon artistic endeavor (to oppose Harold Bloom!), given that it was received in the company of six painting girls.

Speaking of connections with visual art, the finale of "Kew Gardens," in which "wordless voices" were "breaking the silence," only to be countered by the assertion that, in modern life, there are "omnibuses" and no true silence, paralleled the use of vibrant color at the expense of "shadow" in domestic painting. In fact, the flowers' "colours" (45) is our final remaining image. Woolf, in perhaps her only similarity to the Futurists, seems here to be embracing the dynamism and vitality of modern life rather than bemoaning its lack of silence; I recall a scene from The Hours in which Virginia feels an incurable draw back to her frantic-but-invigorating London lifestyle.

In "A Mark on the Wall," Woolf characterizes the act of interpretation (and indeed, the sense I get interpreting her short stories) as a "swarm" of "thoughts," a multitude like a group of ants or insects, each perception individuated and yet part of the whole (47) . She explores this mode of thought thematically throughout the piece, before her thoughts must be defined, pinned, and fixed by the "mark's" literal definition. I'm wondering if she is presciently hinting at our current analysis of language, in that agreeing upon a central "definition" of a word or even a work of literature necessarily prohibits that word/work's "play" and infinitude of possibilities. Woolf subtly takes issue with the masculine modernists' obsession with "hard, dry things" and specificities, exclaiming that "I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts" (49). Retaining the hard and the dry as sole literary obsessions, she implies, leads to a certain shallow vacuousness. Later, she returns to the problem of "standards," whether of "things" or of perhaps linguistic definitions, stating that "Man" has taken their place -- for now. What will follow, she hopes, is a sort of freedom, of expression and of thought, the feverish freedom to which she strives in her stories. However, the "Mark's" definition as a "snail" throws this reverie into question, perhaps displaying that for all our experimentations, the minute and the concrete, the small, slimy things, still matter in a narrative.

A General Impression

At the moment overcoming my apprehension of crossing into the visual arts genre as a novice (this apprehension to be channeled in the near future into making a visual journal), I will begin by assessing the Modernist experiments in the literary realm as in many ways clinging to the coattails of the various radical, avante-garde movements in visual art also underway. To name the most obvious example that comes to mind, Ezra's Pound "imagist" movement seems to attempt to do for literature what the impressionists or even surrealists did for art -- to capture an ideosyncratic moment in time, favoring the expression of emotion over obvious representationality. Both the impressionists and the surrealists, indeed along with all pioneers of absract art, operated as "first responders" to a Western crisis of the subject and its representation, deriving from Christian humanism (CCM, 204), that resulted from the works of Freud and Darwin. The latter removed humanity from its centrality to the world order, and the former served to complicate notions of free will and objective truth: these new philosophies that would come to define the modern world had an obvious impact on art, later on literature.

For me, the Surrealists' (and magic realists') theoretical and visual combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought presented a highly creative (and bizarre) new form. Though we still have a legacy of perceiving art as primarily consummed by an elite for the sake of decoration and cultural capital, (particularly even in terms of more abstracted art) it is obvious through this genre that art can also operate as an incitement to revolution or an indictment of a given society. I'm no Marxist, but the idea that unconscoius connections can be channeled by visual media/images in order to disrupt a hegemonic or stagnated worldview is highly intriguing.

To retrace the links between literature and art, what seems to be endemic in both spheres during the Modernist era is a sense of warring schools, each seeking to be the dominant form (as opposed to our own, in which fragmented niche forms coexist simultaneously). It would take a seperate post to work out which groups and philosophies corresponded -- indeed, this week's readings seemed to complicate which areas intersected and which contrasted. For example, while abstracted art seems a more elite, mathematical/logical form on par with Eliot, Hulme, et. all, MacCarthy and Bell focus on its ability to take a snapshot of the artist's emotion, without having to sculpt this feeling into "cold" representational reality.

Furthermore, what Desmond MacCarthy observes as the post-impressionists' rethinking of traditional chiaroscuro in representation (99) appears to be a precursor to a post-structuralist, or at least an anti-metaphysical, understanding of binaries as they have historically operated in eschatological thinking, particularly in our CCM's depiction of the choice to throw our foremother Eve out of the shadows and into full color. With many of the assumptions of Western philosophy and spirituality thus critiqued, artists were also able to experiment in a more diverse, multicultural way than ever before; for example, Van Gogh's use of Japanese prints or Picasso's rendition of African masks. Surely, Modernist literary London must have felt concurrent exhileration and envy as they studied their artistic cousins.

Speaking of Michelangelo...

Like the modernist prose (Howard's End) and critical essays that have been assigned thusfar, Eliot's early poetry tends to dwell upon the vissicitudes of modern life, whether the crowd that "rubs and questions" the artistic "bloom" to its own diminishment, or the imagery of disposal and waste in old newspapers of his Prelude's first stanza. Indeed, T.S. Eliot's first works appear to already contain a sense of intimidation, or repulsion, by crowds or swarms -- for example, the horrofic glut of faceless "sirens" that Prufock perceives women to be, or the "trampling" of feet in the Preludes that implicitly buries the soul. Obviously, the flux of humanity Eliot depicts is always a part of his hard-boiled city vignettes, blending in with the atmosphere and presenting a homogenity and a soullessness that gives the early poetry its unique, dull pain. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting that Eliot's themes are similar to Forster's, a man who is starkly different in both personality and politics. Eliot's Portait of a Lady and Le Figlia Che Piagne strategically break with their homogenous environment in his use of second person, portraying at once a crucial, potential connection and that connection's failure to fully "bloom" or materialize.

While all of our reading excluding the Preludes could be interpreted as love or courtship poetry, Eliot transcends this category by postulating heterosexual romance as a method to heal the fragmented isolation endemic to modern life rather than an ultimate and monothematic end unto itself. For this reason, as well as his sensitive Portrait of a dying woman who quietly and heroically "serves tea to friends," I cannot peg T.S. Eliot or even Prufrock as one-dimensional, "conservative" misogynists. The female gender is not the "Other" to Prufock: all of humanity is.

It is apparent that Eliot was already conceptualizing his theories on poetry, and the direction it should take in the Modern world, in his early works. For me, La Figlia Che Piange most visibly demonstrated the ideas Eliot expressed in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent": the love-interest that "weaves the sunlight" into her hair almost insidiously invites a conventional reading of the poem, which is soon disrupted and skewed by the metaphor of the "fugitive" with its contemporary, near-politicized diction. This sort of ambivalent or contradictory reading that such a work invites is obviously a New Critic's dream, particularly in the last line where the weeping girl disturbs both the "troubled midnight" and "noon's repose" -- because of his failed connection with her, he cannot have the comfort of sinking into either complacency or despair. Beginning with Eliot, the New Criticism is by necessity wedded to a particular form of a particular era, removing the poet from his (yes, in this era of criticism, his) poetry in a manner that may have been freeing to an antiromantic, yet emotional individual.

We should not forget that Eliot and his critical posse were once avante-garde, with a new style to purify and canonize. And yet, for all his talk of rebellion from the near-past of Romanticism and Victorianism, this week's selection of Eliot appears to borrow extensively from Robert Browning's experiments with dramatic monologue. Eliot incorporates this technique to both draw in and distance his audience, leaving it ambiguous whether the "you" in his poems is the reader or is another character with whom his speaker is conversing. This method intriguingly mirrors his commercial strategy of catering to an elite, "select" audience, increasing his poetry's premium artistic value while still, of course, selling poetry. I would not categorize Eliot's style as a commercial formula, but I would also not rule such considerations out altogether: indeed, such an interpretation would lend a layer of irony to the "rubbed rose" of the private Chopin concert in his Portrait or the discarded newspapers of his Preludes. Furthermore, Eliot reflects upon modern life's commodification of both artistic and human relationships in his censored Pervigilium and in Portrait of a Lady's epitaph and very title. The latter perhaps refereces Manet's Olympia, in which the sexualized subject of an artistic elite's private consumption gazes back.