Virginia Woolf

            On Monday morning I worked out almost all the chords for "Quand ça balance" (When Off Balance) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have it finished and ready to upload to Christian’s Translations on Tuesday. 

            I weighed 89.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I took a siesta from 11:30 to 13:00. 

            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. I had lettuce, tomato, cucumber, avocado, scallion and dill with raspberry vinaigrette. 

             Around 14:00 I saw that this week’s Brit Lit 2 lecture had been posted early for a change. But I still wanted to take a bike ride and so I rode to Bloor and Ossington. It was warm enough this time that I didn’t need a scarf or gloves. When I got home it was about 15:15 and still more than two hours ahead of when last week’s lecture was posted. 

            The lecture was on Virginia Woolf; her story “The Mark On the Wall”; Modernism; writing; and the transition from the 19th to the 20th Century. It was also twenty minutes shorter than last week's video. 

            There is an interesting continuity from the realism of George Eliot (who was loved by Woolf), through Wilde into modernism and questions of modern fiction. 

            Of the transition. Surprisingly, culturally and socially 1900 Britain was much like and highly contiguous with the Britain of 1850. But by 1950 and even the 1920s and 1930s, there was a rapid transformation because of the world wars; the great depression; technological transformations due to the telephone, radio and automobiles which increased industrialization and speed of life and technology; privatization of religion and decreased public importance of the church. Belief becomes a private rather than a public exercise; social class structure is weakened practically beyond notice. Some upper class modernist writers struggled to deal with this; the final emancipation of women arrived that had been fought for since over a century. 

            The key difference between the Victorian and modern era is the perception that changes have broken apart the things that gave consistency and continuity to the world. The perception that the changes were more radical was distinctive to the modernists of the first half of the 20th Century. The modernists in art and culture looked back on the changes of the Victorian period and saw them as part of a gradual progressive reform in which past and present are continuous. The modernists saw themselves irretrievably broken from the Victorian world. We can see the changes as gradual but they saw themselves radically cut off from the world before. We can see this in ourselves. We also are broken from our own world of a few years ago. They thought they were in a different world than their parents. 

            The idea of things falling apart comes from a famous Yeats poem called “The Second Coming”. He lived from mid 19th to mid 20th. This poem probably has given more titles to works of music, works of art and other things than any other poem. It has been pillaged for its lines. It gets to the sense of things falling apart, of difficult loss of continuity and consistency with the world. 

            He is suggesting that the changes that have rocked his world are coming to fruition. There is the sense in this poem, so crisply captured, of transformation approaching the world. He is not optimistic. What is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born is a beast. Not necessarily the devil but not necessarily something good like the coming of paradise or the return of the privileged past. He sees a new world that is broken from the previous world. The poem captures how the modernists felt. 

            Modernism is certainly the most ambiguous of terms for all the periods we’ve studied in this course. It’s a difficult term to grasp. To put it in as clear terms as one can, within the historical context, it is a mirror of fragmentation and change, a somewhat perceptual sense of fragmentation. Coming out of aestheticism’s rebellion against a particular version of realism, the early 20th Century saw the emergence of interconnected sets of intellectual and aesthetic developments in Britain and the rest of the world. This came to be called Modernism, emphasizing newness and moving on from the past. This movement considered itself to be against what it saw as the conventions of literature, poetry, fiction, painting, music and philosophy. It shunned materialism, the linear, the decorative and the sentimental. It tended to present reality as fractured, fragmented and it tended to reject depictions of unified wholes, single points of view and unbroken narratives. In fiction it favoured a realism of the mind using stream of consciousness to capture in writing the process of thinking. They thought this was central to what writers should be doing. Modernism is a constellation of aesthetic and intellectual values that pushed back against what it saw as conventional depictions of connectedness. It asked how to make meaning of a disconnected world. 

             Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” and “The Mark of the Wall”. She was a tremendous essayist and wrote many classic essays about art, literature, life, life between the wars, relationships between men and women, and between the classes. She sets up what she thinks realism should do. This is in continuity with other arguments we’ve seen about realism. The second half of this class has consisted of artists telling us what realism is. What is at stake is that realism comes down to emphasis. 

            Woolf sets up her argument against a particular way of writing that she rejects in favour of a new way of writing. She rejects the materialism of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. What is this materialism? The question of emphasis is that they write of unimportant things. They spend their time on the trivial and transitory rather than the true and endearing. This is matter of emphasis. A difference between what they and her find endearing. She is saying that Bennett depicts an overly unified world, too whole, and too external, too concerned with windows, houses, buttons, and shirts, rather than the internal lives of people. What people live for is the most important, not what they wear, where they live and what they drive, and who they know. What do they live for? What is their interiority? What is their psychology? She says Bennett fails because he perfectly renders an external world that is empty. 

            This idea is reflected in “The Mark On The Wall”. She takes issue with the dullness of historical fiction and wants to get away from the airless, shallow shells of the world. She wants to emphasize that art is an indirect encounter with truth. The indirect encounter with the world is valued. When she mentions looking she is referring to Eliot and Adam Bede and the idea that art is a looking glass for reality. When we look only to the outside we only see a shallow world full of hollow things and people. We don’t see the internal but the material. She is saying here and in “Modern Fiction” that what we want is depth. We don’t know the people we see. That is what a novelist should explore. Descriptions of reality are to her materiality. What seems real according to Eliot is getting the right kind of tablecloth and that everyone had to show the realism of the time. Woolf says very precise realism is not real. These are not real tablecloths. She is saying that the real must be encountered indirectly. Not what exists in the world or what the authorities say exists but the hidden reality in our experience. 

            In Modern Fiction realism turns around the question of how to represent life. For Bennett life is about external verisimilitude; the right clothes and the right kinds of homes, etc. Woolf thinks that is wrong. She’s rebelling against custom. Life is not external things but the phenomenological feeling of living and thinking. Novels should represent what it’s like to be a living person rather than realistic depictions of externals. Realism for Woolf should represent phenomenological experience of the world as we experience it. She asks us to look within life to see what the world is like. That is the true representation of the world and not how it looks from outside. This is far from Eliot who believed the goal of art was reflecting reality. But Eliot is sort of aware of what Woolf and Wilde are talking about. She admits that we only encounter the world of our experience through a somewhat warped mirror. What Woolf wants is not a rejection of Eliot but a re-emphasization. Eliot thinks the mirror still works though warped. Woolf wants to emphasize the idiosyncratic nature of experience. But they have the same goal of connection with people. Eliot would agree that if the depiction of the peasants is just external and doesn’t look inside past the stereotypes it is missing reality. So the two are united and on about the same thing. Eliot wants first hand experience rather than stereotypes. The clergyman has wholeness and that is the same thing Woolf is looking for. Woolf wants to emphasize experience over character and that’s the difference. 

            We get this emphasis in a famous passage in which she explains how we should describe our encounters with the world. Realism should reflect phenomenal experience. She asks us to look into life to see what the world is like. She is trying to express that life is not a set of contained experiences that are meaningful and understandable. But a semitransparent halo that we wander through the world with. We see the world through this mesh of experience. It is the novelist’s job to convey the world through this messiness of consciousness rather than cut it out and take it away. She gives us one of the most typical expressions of modernism. She claims that the artist is constrained by tradition. The spirit of modernism is a straining desire for aesthetic freedom. She is stepping more generally from what she said before. She says the artist needs freedom to represent the world and not be chained to tradition. If Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy are writing about materialism then the public will reject her approach. She says she can have a different and equally valid way of representing the world. She says the problem is artistic freedom. For the moderns the problem is in psychology. This comes through in “The Mark On The Wall” because it is about interiority. Although it is about a mark on the wall that is unimportant in itself. It is only important as a focus point for reflection. 

            The story illustrates Woolf’s claims for fiction that come to their fullest fruition in her novels To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Galloway. We can see her playing with these ideas in this story. One of the assistant professor’s regrets of the limits of space is not having To The Lighthouse in this course. It is the one thing he wishes he could bring in. It is an extended version of what we are seeing in “The Mark On the Wall”. It is a beautiful, powerful, interesting novel. Think about it in terms of what it is like to be a thinking person and how our minds bounce off of things. We think about something and something else comes in, then we meet someone and they say something, or we hear something that changes our thought. 

            The story and the mark itself is a device for reflection. It is a way of internalizing the focus of the story. One of the first things we recognize in the story is the way the mark on the wall, the ostensible subject of the story, remains indefinite, allusive, ephemeral and trivial. One of the surest ways to misread the story is to make the mark a symbol of something else. It gestures towards some other concepts and ideas but the point is not that the mark is the war, the depression, or her depression. It could be all those things but the point is that it is an external stimulus for the narrator’s internal reflections. The story is meant to reflect the process of the thinking mind. It is a catalyst. That does more than it means in itself. Even the revelation at the end that it is a snail is not the answer to the question. It doesn’t do anything for us. It has meaning as a living thing, it is natural, but it is not a mystery to be solved. The fact that it is a snail doesn’t change the meaning of her reflections. 

            The mark is a catalyst for reflection. She wants to think. We see here a lot of things she talked about in “Modern Fiction” to try to depict what a thinking mind is like. The way that ideas pass through our heads. They are not meaningful, they just pop in. Shakespeare comes with no purpose but she gets from him the thought that a shower of ideas fell through his mind just as they are now falling through hers. There is symmetry with Shakespeare and the story. The mark is an excuse for thinking. It is about the value of slowing down, thinking and pausing. The narrator is confronted by the pain, injustice and artificial hierarchies of social and political life. This is indirectly articulated. This is what she is talking about with “Whitaker’s Table of Precedency”. References to masculine definitions of reality. Confronted by these external forms that are trying to define what matters. Instead of thinking of those things such as injustice, think of the mark. What does that mean? Whitaker’s table of prescedency is unfairness. It is a list of men that can rule Britain, of hierarchical importance containing no women or people of colour. In the face of this unfairness she says think of the mark on the wall. 

            He asks us to pause and think of that. During the pause we hear the assistant professor guzzling his drinking canister. 

            I think that reflecting on the mark is a meditation that returns one to oneself. The external world full of injustice is not real but the mark allows one to reflect on the real. There are no hierarchies in reflection. 

            A lot of the stuff that seems real is ultimately unimportant and unreal. She says the mark is something to hold onto that is more substantial than politics and the rest of the world. The mark allows her to reflect on her own consciousness and hold onto it. The word “think” is key. It is repeated throughout the story and at the end. She says thinking is why we have contempt for men of action who do not think. The world operates by convention, rule and habit, and does so without thinking. Taking a moment to look at the mark on the wall gives one a chance to think and disrupt all those operations that happen habitually around us. To contemplate them. Thinking allows us to pause, to take comfort, to recognize a larger world that will continue around us. There is more to life than external bits. It is reminiscent of what Wilde is saying about doing nothing. Contemplation, as Wilde said, is the most difficult thing. She agrees. Thinking is stopping. She is not saying look at the mark instead because that is avoidance. It is not cowardice, or a refusal to act, but an effort to see the value of the things that disappear in times of crisis. The story end with a reminder that everything is fleeting. Things are disappearing but contemplation recalls them to be valued. 

            This is all he has to say right now on Woolf and Modernism. He gave a low amount of reading because he wants us to look through her work carefully. She is difficult and not simple to read. We are following a thinking mind in action. Often in a novel we get a passage where a character relays things they’ve thought about and we see this in On Beauty. But those thoughts are clearly articulated. But in Woolf we don’t have thoughts, opinions or ideas. We have actual thinking. We have inaction. The story displays for us what it is like to be thinking. If we follow our train of thought by sitting down as she does and try to follow thought we see it constantly changes directions as new thoughts come in. We get distracted and return to the original thought. But the mind just goes there and jumps to something else and then multiplies examples of something and then associates this with a bunch of other things. She is saying the novel and fiction should represent that process with all of its backtracks, changes, associations and jumps as we experience them as thinking people. Without metanarrative framework that tells us now I’m thinking about this, now I’m going back to that thought, now I’m associating this idea with that. All of the framing that would tell us about the train of thought we are following are removed. We have to follow her mind along and see the associations she is making. And if you can do that it is rewarding and aesthetically beautiful. 

           

            It took me almost three and a half hours to make notes on the lecture but that was because I paused the video a lot to make sure there were less typos. 

            I weighed 88.6 kilos at 19:00. 

            It took me only about forty minutes to correct my notes this time. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before dinner. I had lettuce, cucumber, tomato, avocado, onion, dill, mushrooms and chopped jalapeno with the last of my raspberry vinaigrette while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Barney takes all his savings out of the bank and decides to buy a car. He answers one of the first ads he sees and a sweet old lady brings the ten year old auto around. She says it belonged to her late husband and it’s precious to her. Andy advises him to take it for a test drive to a mechanic and have him look it over, but Barney thinks that would be an insult and he is so moved by the elderly woman’s story that he gives her $300 cash. She leaves and is later picked up by someone who she says is her nephew who she informs that they unloaded another one to the sucker of the world. I saw that coming. Barney takes Andy, Bee, Opie, Thelma Lou and Gomer for a drive in the country and the car proceeds to fall apart as they go. They have to push it back to town. Later Gomer relays the message from Wally at the filling station that the car needs about ten major parts to function properly. He also found sawdust in the deferential and transmission. Andy says that’s the oldest trick in the book. Gomer says it makes worn out gears run smooth as silk for a few days. Andy and Barney decide to drive to Mount Pilot with the car to get Barney’s money back but the car breaks down on the way. Andy walks to a store to use a phone to call Gomer and while waiting for him they both fall asleep in the back seat. A tow truck arrives and starts pulling the car and that’s when Andy and Barney wake up. They notice it’s not Gomer’s truck and Andy says they should keep out of sight and find out where they are end up. The car is pulled into a garage where they see the old lady with her gang and arrest them. Later Barney says he’s going to be very careful and when another old lady named Rose Temple arrives to sell her car he is overly suspicious. When she talks about only having driven it on Sundays to the church her nephew preaches at. Barney shouts, “Who you kidding sister!” Then he tells her to get out just as her nephew the clergyman comes to check on her. That seems to indicate she’s legitimate but couldn’t anyone wear a minister’s collar? 

            The old lady crook, Myrt Hubcaps Lesh was played by Ellen Corby, who went to Hollywood to become an actor but ended up working for twelve years as an unpaid script assistant before getting a single part. She was nominated for an Oscar best supporting actress for her performance in I Remember Mama. She won three Emmys for her role as Grandma Walton on The Waltons. 

            Rose Temple was played by Hallene Hill, who played the mother of Birdie Hicks in Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair.