Woolf’s Short Stories

The previous class period provided much food for thought, both in the completion of my project as well as in viewing Allison’s presentation on Bloomsbury’s contemporaneous cinema. I did appreciate learning about the prejudice leveled against the burgeoning medium of film by Pound et al. One notion struck me: I detected a certain fear in the dismissal of film. If theatre is a “living” art that disappears when it’s over while literature and painting are static arts that are repeatable, then the advent of film presents a certain dilemma to writers. The public may be able to fulfill its need for narrative entertainment via the picture show rather than settling down with a book or short story – or so one might think hastily.

Or, perhaps, it was merely classist bigotry, as we teased about in class.

On the matter of Virginia Woolf’s short stories, one finds a very direct yet light touch with the language – almost as if she had perfected the notion of rumination into an equation and applied it directly to the page.

One key theme that I found was that of filtered perception – echoes, shadows, mirrors, and, mistakes. Small observations turn on the objects that set everything in relief – in some ways, not unlike many of the Post-Impressionist paintings seen last week.

Take, for example, “The Mark on the Wall.” The narrator meditates on a small mark on the wall, wondering how it got there and what it could mean. The narrator then, almost in free association, makes connections between elements of “her” observation that the outer world. With each level of observation, one is forced to reconsider the mark on the wall. Indeed, even the narrator notes how far afield some of these connections are. The mark, in being a mark, becomes much more than a mark while retaining its nature as a mark. It is almost like a linguistics game. At the end, when that mark, which the narrator had guessed to be a nail turns out to be a snail, the reader must then shift perceptions retroactively while remaining conscious of how the nail and the snail became related. Likewise, reflections and hazy perceptions figure into the other stories. “Kew Gardens” features not only a couple in reflection, but also another snail meandering through the flora, picking up pieces of the conversation. In “An Unwritten Novel,” one quote stands out for me:

“Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of – what?”

There is something remarkably defined-yet-indefinite, like a zen koan, in those words. Perhaps that is at the heart of the reflections in these stories – something being expressed while being hidden.

Another thing struck me in these readings: The War. It is mentioned, but it seems almost alien. In one sense, it almost seems to set the milieu by stating that the War exists and is a simple fact of life, almost like the tides. That being said, the “distance” of the War makes these stories that inhabit this world makes it seem almost an alien thing, and that the deep internal life within these stories serves as a reaction to the tumult without.