This book has a strange format, containing excerpts from A Room Of One’s Own (essay, based on lectures at Cambridge, 1929), The Waves (novel, 1931) Street Haunting (essay, 1927) and How Should One Read A Book? (essay, 1925, published in The Common Reader). I felt like I didn’t really know what I was reading! In the end, I think I have discovered that they are all excerpts from longer essays or novels but this was after quite a lot of googling. We’re not provided with any further information about any of the texts within the “Vintage Minis” book itself. A former colleague’s father used to call these examples dislocated from their original contexts, ‘bleeding chunks’ when talking about “The Best of Mozart” type albums. I think his point is more or less valid. I wished there were more of the good chunks and was confused and flummoxed by the bad ones. And what joins these bleeding chunks together? Well, ‘liberty’ according to the book’s title. In running order, broadly; liberty to write as a woman; liberty to seduce men (perhaps?); liberty to wander about the street and imagine what the people you pass might be up to and liberty to read how one wants. Although I suppose one could argue that Woolf is actually impinging on your liberty to read as one wants by writing an essay making recommendations on the same topic! But after reading a page or two of the document this becomes self-evidently false. So, after some investigation, this is a collection of excerpts, united by their relevance to the theme of liberty, all written by Virginia Woolf between 1925-1931 when she was in her 40s. One feature I really didn’t like were the pages dotted through the book like adverts with some supposedly aphoristic comment printed in large font. I’ll go through the individual chunks in order before making some conclusions.
Section from A Room Of One’s Own
The clarity and readability of the prose was initially refreshing after Nabokov although this impression was diminished a bit by some of the later excerpts.
The idea of women being unable to write well because of being angry and defensive about the criticism they receive from men for doing it seems well argued but, to me, a bit of a stretch when applied to women in general. Woolf also admits this in her praise for Emily Bronte and Jane Austen but makes it clear that these are exceptions, and exceptional exceptions at that, and not the rule:
Writing about Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre, “the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?”
Throughout, this essay was fluid and felt very well researched and argued, Woolf seems to have effortless control of the material and adroitly guides us through her reasoning.
Section from The Waves
It’s hard to work out what is going on and frustrating to have characters that we know we’ll never get fully acquainted with. Half of the passage is a girl’s internal monologue while at home in a rural setting having returned home from a school in Switzerland. The other half seems to be a monologue by Jinny, a schoolmate of the nameless narrator, delivered to her friend and is a story about her going to a glamorous ball, feeling desirable and meeting men. Of all the chunks, this one struck me as bleeding most profusely! I felt reading it was a bit like trying to listen to someone speak underwater. Some of the impressions are wonderfully vivid but it was disjointed and badly chosen.
Section from Street Haunting and Other Essays is more comprehensible than the passage from The Waves but still moves about at a dizzying pace and was all a bit much for me presented in its dislocated context.
How Should One Read a Book?
This was blissfully enjoyable for an avid reader with many familiar opinions and true observations from Woolf’s own, clearly extensive and perceptive, reading. There were many passages that made me stop to nod in assent or to smile at how astutely she had captured the myriad facets, and pleasures, of reading. For example, the sanctity of the library and the properties of equality and liberty it can encapsulate:
“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have none”
More pleasing even still for someone given to writing about what they read and attempting to record, locate and describe more precisely what, and how, the books make them feel were the passages on this illusive preoccupation:
“It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first - to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating - that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and say, ‘Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is the bad; that is good’. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself.”
“And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgements are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.”
The idea of reading as it’s own reward has always been one incredibly close to my heart and Woolf finishes on this most enthusiastic of notes:
“Yet who reads to bring about an end, however, desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’”
I couldn’t help but wonder after reading it whether Woolf is hinting here that reading is really her God; leaving her with no need of an elevated, paternal figure. Obviously the risk here is that I get lost in amongst the warm pleasure of shared passion for a subject and overlook any and every shortcoming because of this so perhaps my opinions on this chunk should be seasoned with a pinch of salt!
In conclusion, on the basis of these limited and assorted passages, I found Woolf’s style to be very dense and teeming with ideas. This can lead to it feeling a bit frenzied and leave some of the ideas feeling a bit half formed.
The chunks cut from The Waves & Street Haunting seemed to work less well for me than A Room of One’s Own and How Should One Read A Book?. Impressions pile up very quickly in Woolf’s prose and she switches between scenes very rapidly and fluidly in both the section from The Waves and the section from Street Haunting. In some ways it seems like a definite topic such as, ‘women in literature’ or, ‘how to read book’ is necessary to retain some focus! Her prose is so rich with ideas sometimes they can feel a bit half formed or out of focus. For example, she declares, “Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence in art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women.” in A Room Of One’s Own. However, 3 pages later, which must constitute all of 200 words in such a small volume, when pontificating on women’s writing in general she says, “She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.” To the lay person this sounds like a direct and fairly glaring contradiction! If the essence of art is self-expression, how can someone simultaneously be using writing as art but not as self-expression? A rupture like this gives me pause for thought. Is the author really thinking about each individual firework in this pyrotechnic extravaganza of ideas? Or is she just piling them up, one upon another, focussing on the density and number of explosions, with little thought for the coherence of the whole? Even if this is the case, it seems like her writing would still contain a huge amount of fascinating ideas. However, some sections do have a clunky and haphazard feel.
The overall feeling I was left with was, ‘I want to read some of these books!’ Probably in the order of A Room of One’s Own, How Should One Read A Book?, Street Haunting and then The Waves. I didn’t really like it as a format and think it ruins some sections but it is hard to deny that it does provide an introduction to her work. It’s ultimately ill conceived and I think my time would have been better spent just reading Virginia Woolf in the format and context in which it was originally published!
No comments:
Post a Comment