Woolf - what does she mean?

A little earlier Emily asked "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" And the Stage Manager says, "No. Saints and poets, maybe--they do some."

I think the gig lamps are self-centered passions, brightly lit moments in our lives that we believe to be of great importance, not taking the time to realize that ALL of our lives are illuminated, every moment, but most of us are too dim to recognize it. So there.

'I am very anxious to get there. Ah, there is a light from the window!'

'Tis not from the window. That's a gig-lamp, to the best of my belief.'

ANZAC - acronym - australia new zealand army corps, famous since anzac landing Gallipoli Cove, Turkey (the movie tells the tale but leaves out the NZers)
1914. Also yummy biccies (cookies) made with oats, coconut, golden syrup among other things.

(2) where's is the quote from? Moments of Being?

and

2.) Who cares?

2) 'modern fiction'

She is a bore if all, or most, literature is a bore. But we don't want to get to thinking that way, I don't think.

Rereading a james wood essay (see other post) this morning and saw him talking about the quote!

"In (insert lots of essays), she argued that character was at the center of great fiction, and that character had changed 'on or about December 1910.' This was a literary change. Character, to the Edwardians, was everything that could be described; to her generation it was everything that could not be described. The Edwardians blunted character, she felt, by stubbing it into things--clothes, politics, income, houes, relatives. She wanted to sharpen character into the invisible.

Arnold Bennett thought that Dr. Watson, in Sherlock Holmes was 'a real character.' But to Woolf, Dr. Watson was 'a sack stuffed with straw.' First of all, said Woolf, what was 'reality'? To the Edwardians, reality was a furniture sale, everything that could be seen, tagged, and marked. But Woolf wanted to break from what she called this materialism, and to look for darker corridors. Reality is 'a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.' It was 'consciousness' and its relation to the 'luminous halo' that was the exquisite distress of Woolf's literary generation. But this new awareness was not an evaporation into the aesthetic. Again and again, Woolf insists on her word, 'life.' It was because she felt that life had escaped from Arnold Bennett's novels that she punished them so: 'Perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.' She chafed at the vagueness of the word, yet its vagueness was its spur. It was the fate of modernist writing to be merely an advance in failure, because 'life' is so resistant to being broken into words. 'Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure,' she implored her skeptical readers. 'We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.' 'I think,' she wrote in her Diary, of The Waves, 'this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore the most complete failure.'"

this means even less than the one we started with

i think as a theorist (or just "thinker") woolf is a bit pants, really

i think the bit of wood-being-woolf up there gets the essentials of modernism as reaction to realism a bit wrong, although i'm not sure if woolf does or if wood's summary does. (will take my modernism without platonism if possible ta muchly.)

i feel bad about being the first person to use the m-word.

This thread is a little off my topic, but I like it enough to resurrect it instead of creating a new one.

I'm curious what you think about DeSalvo's reworking of "The Voyage Out" into "Melymbrosia". Mostly, I was wondering if it seems, for lack of a better word, moral to print an author's work in a way they decided against.

I enjoyed Valerie Eliot's manuscript version of "The Wasteland", and Matthiessen reworked the Watson Trilogy himself, but "Melymbrosia" just seems icky.

"Icky" is a good one-word review. Makes me want to not touch it.

I've instinctively avoided Woolf. It's the ethereal hairstyle and soft, unfocussed gaze she exhibits in her photos, perhaps. The specimen quotes given earlier in this thread only confirm me in my tendency. The miasma of beautiousness is too thick to breath.

I have to admit, I'm a little surprised at the dislike of Woolf on ILB. I think that she embodies the idea of making it new, but in a way that isn't superfluos. I know that she is forced upon many of us as the token female Modernist by lazy PHDs, and, therefore, we may be predispossed to have a gag reflex when talking about her. But I've always been challenged and entertained by her writing.

i love this thread title

"Miasma of beauteousness" OTM.

severely

silence, please do not let our caterwaulings dissuade you from findng Woolf challenging and entertaining. One's reactions to a style are a matter of taste and the more unusual the style, the more pronounced the reaction becomes.

In Woolf's case, my reaction just happens to be aversion, since my mind cringes away from her more empurpled flights of fancy and demands plainer fare. Yours, apparently, is more in tune with her style than is mine.

I really like some of her books, but she has driven me into a fury more than once, too. And that shit about "Human nature changed on or about December 1910" really drives me up the wall--oh, so an art exhibition YOU helped organise changed the world, did it? An exhibition of stuff that had ALREADY BEEN WIDELY SEEN IN EUROPE! Fuck OFF, Virginia! And for someone married to a Jewish man, she was a vicious anti-semite, too, which is pretty hard to swallow.

"ORLY?"

http://thegoodparts.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/virginia-woolf-1927-2.jpg

she was an anti-semite?

not in a hardcore nazi way, just the way most britishes people were in those days.

dude who took issue with the december 1910 thing -- i feel your pain, but for her it was a throwaway line, not a big statement. i'd have to check but i don't even know that she explains what it's a reference to in the essay. and the original version of the essay (ok full disclosure, the first piece she wrote with the title 'mr bennett and mrs brown') doesn't mention it at all.

it's rubbish hackademic modernist stans who have turned it into a big deal.

otoh the exhbition *was* a big deal for british artistic and literary types, marked a changing of the guard and all that.

Throwaway line perhaps, but so achingly pretentious.
And she was more than normally anti-Semitic for her time, unfortunately: see the vile little essay 'Jews' in 'Carlyle's House'--written for herself only, it would seem, but the more revealing for that.

And I say this all as someone who has loved several of her novels.
The more I read, frankly, the more my sympathies go to Leonard Woolf. AND he was a great writer: I wish he'd done more fiction.

yea leonard was a total bro, been reading his criticism a lot, kind of randomly. big detective fiction fan.

i like her -- objecting to her for writing like, well, like virginia woolf is just silly. if you want something less woolf-ish, go read raymond carver or something.

Yes, but by that logic you can't ever criticise anything ever.

hahaha that "miasma of beauteousness" comment is driving me a little crazy in that it seems apt but also cruel, in that i feel it misconstrues the best of what her prose does. but i cant think of how to refute it, really.

fwiw i was watching generation kill last nite and the line about septimus crying in mrs. dalloway kept appearing in my head and maybe that's what i like about her empurpled flights of fancy is that they seem like true descriptions of near unreal emotional states?

"it's rubbish hackademic modernist stans who have turned it into a big deal." — what does "stans" mean in this sentence? I think I agree with the rest, but I'm a bit confused by this word.

Surprised by my vehemence above.

Quite curious about Leonard Woolf on detective fiction — what are the pieces to read and where can one read them?

I was thinking it was Lenny that wrote the old pelican paperback I have, Civilisation, that I made it three pages into at seventeen or eighteen and decided was the epitome of everything to dislike about Bloomsbury. Having checked, I think it was Clive. Lenny's was called Imperialism and Civilisation.

She's a brilliant critic and essayist - would much rather read than any of her novels. Like Alfred sez, the Common Reader books are great. The Oxford selected essays is worth it for the essays on illness, football, shopping, driving etc etc.

on another five years meditation i think i was right at eighteen

the common reader is horrid, though less bad than arnold bennett's attempt at similar

I think I was right in 2004.

Can Ann Sterzinger come back and look to revise her opinion of Woolf as a 'bore'? Maybe she can settle this dispute.

I find myself about to revise my opinions of both Woolf and Joyce. Haven't read Ulysses (got an old Penguin paperback last night) and Mrs. Dalloway in about five-to-ten-ish years I'd say.

Unfortunately Ann Sterzinger is gone off the net because of Woolf.

Can think of few books of crit that contain as many valuable articles as The Common Reader: essays that explain how Hardy, James, George Eliot, Sterne work.

In Woolf's case, my reaction just happens to be aversion, since my mind cringes away from her more empurpled flights of fancy and demands plainer fare.

the problem with this empurpled sentence is that The Common Reader is full of plainer fare; it was intended for non-literary types

gross

That is problematic - I thought the notion of The Common Reader was going to be a bit more um not so obvious as what the title implies.

But she is witty, certainly see quotes to that effect now and then.

The Common Reader is full of plainer fare

I'd be willing to give The Common Reader a shot, although to the best of my knowledge I've never stumbled over a copy of it, yet. It shouldn't be too hard to hunt one up, but then, I've got two dozen books in the queue already sitting on my shelf and waiting their turn, so VW may not get much play with me any time soon.

i recall liking some things from 'the common reader'.

tom's vehement disgust is entertaining.

the pinefox was indeed right (as usual).

'mrs dalloway' is as great as anything i've ever read.

I love you, J.D. !

Yeah Mrs Dalloway (and all the Woolf I've read so far, even The Voyage Out which I wasn't expecting much from) is so great, this is a goofy thread

It's true. She was one of the greatest. And generally not very obscure at all - very communicative and lucid.

Yeah, if you listen

"She is a bore if all, or most, literature is a bore."

well, yes.

Is someone making you read

culture is

i think its an interesting sentiment for someone who spends as much time being a hater ov litt on these boards as the p.f. does to espouse ~

tbf i just opened the nearest woolf at random and found a sentence i rather liked: "And the Queen, who knew a man when she saw one, though not, it is said, in the usual way, plotted for him a splendid ambitious career."

it is said

Didn't know pinefox hated on lit aside from Pynchon (which I disagree w him abt, esp if it's cos he doesn't like the sex) tbh

Also if yr gonna hate on VW but still have her books to hand, cool

hey man she's a major writer and everything no doubt i just really dislike her a bunch

the pinefox is full of love

in fact bjork wrote that one song about him

the pinefox is full of bjork

http://maitzenreads.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway.html

^ this blogger teaches Victorian Lit.

Nice to come across this just now - racing through Mrs. Dalloway, really the first time I am thinking about London as a novel.

seems she means SEMICOLONS

i actually really enjoy her colon-semicolon steez these days

V. Woolf a secret libertine thanks to promiscuous semicolon use.

no secret it's ALL OVER THE DAMN PAGE

semicolon use in Orlando pretty decadent imo

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/chasing-the-writer-virginia-woolf/

Last week there was the start of this terrible three-part drama series on Bloomsbury. I think that book would be a basis for something better (as drama). Of course, it would possibly not get past the legal team.

(Forrester) also clearly feels an ardent affinity for Woolf, bordering on rapture, which quickly becomes the most problematic aspect of this portrait. Influenced by Woolf’s incantatory, imagistic style, Forrester writes far too many sentences like this one:

And endlessly failing in this, having failed, having admitted that “no, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known,” having rejected such proof or knowledge and retained the uncertainty of achieving the exactitude beyond the silence that surrounds words, having above all and endlessly repeated her quest: this makes it all the more real, quivering with what she does not know but senses, trembling with what cannot be written down but what she knows how to indicate.

^god that’s awful

biography’s such an ugly business (obv can be good thing too, but.)

i shd reread ‘the waves’
read it as a teen; iirc one of the first novels i fell in love with; yet haven’t read it since (though certain images & phrases stick with me still)
don’t know how it wd/ will strike me now; my taste in sentences has changed
iirc you just have to go with, get & be into, the first person present tense lyric mode of it
maybe to enjoy woolf (at least some of her novels), you can't read cynically (she's not going to win you over)

Amazingly, despite my fandom, I've never touched The Waves. I think I've always been afraid I would find it an over-ambitious failure. Also the copy I have is a bare-bones Dover Thrift copy and I was really attached to reading Woolf with good notes/intros in the Oxford Classics line.

At its worst it inhabits an addled world of purple prose poems, but it's not often at its worst. I reread it every few years.

Woolf's best biographer is Lyndall Gordon.

biography’s such an ugly business (obv can be good thing too, but.)

Its a portrait #deadpans

Its a portrait

lol of course, my mistake

maybe to enjoy woolf (at least some of her novels), you can't read cynically (she's not going to win you over)

― drash, Saturday, August 1, 2015 2:43 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is p accurate i think

i've been meaning to read that one next for .. the three years since i last read a woolf

BBC2 showing A life in Squares. Not watching too closely but it looked like Woolf is being played for laughs.

Not many laughs but more as a victim of illness. I watch the programme. I am glad that BBC makes a Bloomsbury programme but I am afraid that they do not show, or even attempt to show, what was distinctive about the people's work and ideas (V Bell, V Woolf and even more strikingly J M Keynes), therefore they do not really show us why we should bother with these (depicted) people.

The odd nice view of Sussex.

Totally agree - you wouldn't know why these people were important/worth making a TV programme for. I only know bits-and-pieces and wanted to know more about how Keynes ended up with these people. Its something I can look up but still..

Well made and shot, which only goes so far.

xyzzzz yes Keynes is the outlier in a certain way -- I mean he must have been fully part of the group but he differs from them in having turned out to be of massive world-historical importance, one of the most influential intellectuals (on politics, economics, society) in the last 100 years -- there is something qualitatively different about this from 'having been an interesting painter at the time' kind of thing.

http://www.berfrois.com/2015/07/andre-gerard-how-should-one-read-tolstoy-and-woolf/

Lunchtime read: On the relationship btw To the Lighthouse and Anna Karenina