The Delicate Transaction

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In the chapter in Orlando heralding the approach of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf speaks of the delicate "transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age." Upon it, she continues, "the whole fortune of his works depends." For the novelist of the early 1900's, the transaction would prove to be difficult indeed, for the spirit of the age was one of change. Not only was there a philosophical shift in man's concept of himself and reality, but change moved on all levels, from the historical to the personal. People felt differently now; the position of the heart itself had changed.

Seemingly more sensitive than her contemporaries to this spirit of her age, Mrs. Woolf shows its effect on fiction in a series of essays which illuminate the problems facing the writer of her time and offer a remarkable prophecy of literary forms to come. "In or about December, 191O, human character changed," she stated somewhat arbitrarily in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." The change was due, she explained, to a shift in human relations — "between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." These shifts were related to or part of a larger complex of changes "in religion, conduct, politics, and literature." The Edwardian novelists, especially Arnold Bennett, Mrs. Woolf charged, had not recognized what had taken place inside the very people with whom their novels were concerned. Seeing the world as a globe which constantly moved and tilted with each successive age, she sought the emotional perspective by which the reality of this new era could be viewed.

The date of December, 1910, was not a random choice. It was sufficiently long after Victoria's death for the changing values in England to show themselves. It was, in general, a period of unrest, of experiment, of growth. Abroad, England was encountering serious challenge. At home, other shifts in power were taking place. Wealth was moving from the aristocracy to the middle class. The socialist movement and Labour Party were growing. There were strikes, agitation for women's rights. But there was also a feeling of expansion, of freedom from restraint, of new things stirring that found its way into artistic and intellectual circles. Not only had human character changed, as Mrs. Woolf said, but also the artist's and philosopher's way of looking at the world.

There is an implicit reference in Mrs. Woolf's remark about December, 1910, to the opening of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London, which showed the new way the artists saw reality. It was a world in which time, space, and motion had been split. Human figures were reduced to essence or outline, or given multiple personality; objects were abstracted for values of color and design. It appeared at first a bizarre view of reality. Yet it showed a wholeness of vision, a view of things in the totality of their appearance, which the art critic Roger Fry felt the Impressionists had possessed for the first time.

The desire for a wholeness of vision was to take twentieth-century art, especially that of the novel, into areas where it had never been before, "the dark places of psychology," as Mrs. Woolf phrased it in her essay "Modern Fiction," and the philosopher's new world of time/space. It was true that such different nineteenth-century writers as Thomas De Quincey and Lewis Carroll had written of their visions of dreams and the unconscious, but they did not stir the imagination as did the Russian novelists whose works were now being translated into English, or Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams seemed to authenticate the very voices from the underground heard in Dostoevsky's novels. Frazer's final volumes of The Golden Bough likewise directed the attention to myth, ritual, and the power of symbols whose hold on the racial or collective unconscious Jung would systematically explore.

This new view of man included more than that of a submerged irrational self. Man was seen to be a complex of consciousness, existing on many levels. He was also seen to be a complex of personalities, consisting not of a single integrated ego but rather of separate states of awareness. This "discontinuity" of personality meant that man was never the same from one moment to the next; his identity changed with each new set of perceptions. The instability of self was echoed in the philosophers' view of time, space, and objects, which were also seen as mental concepts. If objects had a life of their own, it was not one which man could know. Man was alone in his visual universe. Once the special creation of a deity, or at least the controlling center of himself and his surroundings, he was now a floating organism, one among many, attempting to establish his identity in an environment he could not truly comprehend.

This total view of man and his universe, which now seemed to be in fragments, was hardly that of Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells. What they were doing, Mrs. Woolf said, was "writing against the grain and current of the times." The modern current seemed that of flux and flow, of the shifting, the discontinuous. It appeared to allow no hold to which the drifting self — or novelist — could cling. It offered no metaphysic save an existential or nihilistic one. Yet this very sense of the fluid, the shifting, the fragmented in life was to become one of the main characteristics of fiction, whether the Edwardians recognized it or not. It was to offer novelists areas of experimentation and possibilities of effect which the nineteenth century could not extend. It was to give them a new range of theme. And it was to force a concentration on the phenomena of life itself, on the moment and its values.

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The transition from the old to the new, from a stable world dealing in absolutes to one committed to the present moment of feeling, was visualized by Virginia Woolf as "the narrow bridge of art" across which the writer must pass, renouncing old methods and taking with him very few of his former tools. In the essay by the same name, which first appeared in 1927, she takes up the problem of change where she had left it four years earlier in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." If human character had changed, so must the form of the novel which would show that character. All around her she found writers who were attempting what they could not achieve, who were forcing the form they used "to contain a meaning strange to it." What the modern novel must do was to take the mould of the modern mind itself.

The difficulties posed seemed enormous. The mind, for Virginia Woolf, was a "queer conglomeration of incongruous things." It was full of "monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions." Yet this emotional world, "tumultuous and contradictory," must be ordered in a form which would express it in its totality. For the novel, Mrs. Woolf wrote elsewhere, "is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel." This form, or structure, is necessarily "one of infinite complexity" because it is made up of many kinds of emotion.

One by one she rejected past literary forms which she felt as inadequate to embody these emotions as "a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock." The lyric poem, the poetic play, and, by implication, the past genres of the novel, were discarded. Yet out of the fragments of these old forms the new ones would arise. "That cannibal, the novel, which has destroyed so many forms of art," she wrote, "will by then have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading. And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen."

It might be said parenthetically that Mrs. Woolf's own novels followed this pattern of remaking and breaking form. Each new novel was "breaking" the "mould," for the individual emotional value of a work demanded for Mrs. Woolf a fresh matrix. Yet each of them reflected, in its way, the novel's "cannibalism" in its synthesis of earlier genres. Viewed in this sense, her novels appear to take elements of drama, poetry, or the essay; techniques of fiction genres such as the poetic romance, the "anatomy" (as Northrop Frye puts it), or the essay novel, and fuse them into a form which continually modifies and adapts itself to its changing subject matter and emotion.

The final shadowy form which Mrs. Woolf foresaw in "The Narrow Bridge of Art" was a synthesis which, in her most complex novel, she herself attained. It was a form, she explained in her essay, which would be dramatic and yet not a play; it would have the "exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose." It would give the outline rather than the detail, observe deeply "but from a different angle." Finally, it would give "the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams."

It is not difficult to relate this final form to Joyce's Finnegans Wake or to Mrs. Woolf's own novel The Waves. By the time her essay was written, several early fragments of Joyce's last novel had appeared. Mrs. Woolf herself had just finished writing To the Lighthouse, with its central part, "Time Passes," like the moving cinema-screen of the sleeping mind. She was already planning Orlando and The Waves. Orlando can be seen as a dream phantasy, an analogue of the writer's imagination. But it is The Waves which may be said to take the shape of her prophecy. Absorbed, like Finnegans Wake, in the imaginative dreaming mind, it verbalizes with creative ingenuity what might be called the stream of unconsciousness — that stream of "memory, experience, contact and imagination" which runs below our conscious thought and which bears a more direct relation to nature and to fate.

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If the new novel's form would express a more total view of man, his mind and his emotions, then the "proper stuff of fiction," as Virginia Woolf phrased it in an essay first drafted in 1919, would consist of "every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit." Ordinary plot, comedy, or catastrophe, which occupied the "materialist" writers (she again takes Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells to task ), would be discarded for the real "life" of the moment, the response of the individual to the "myriad impressions" which constantly assail him, "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms" that "shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday."

Chapter III of this study, which offers Mrs. Woolf's anatomy of the moment, suggests the variety of these impressions whose scope seems to embrace the psycho-physical totality of the self. In the essay "Modern Fiction," quoted above, she is concerned with the process of recording these "atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall," with the tracing of the "pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." Casual as this comment appears, there is implicit in it a suggestion of the scientific spirit of inquiry with which she would approach her analysis of the self and its reactions, a commitment to the idea that life, and the moment of feeling which is its essence, is the most important subject of fiction. For life is "a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist," she asks, "to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display?"

The phrase "a luminous halo" recalls William James's analytic descriptions of states of thought and feeling in his chapter on the stream of consciousness, most particularly his portrayal of the mental image with its "halo of relations," its "'psychic overtone' or 'fringe.'" This "halo" or "psychic overtone" is the aura of the moment of feeling in Mrs. Woolf's novels. Some of the light comes from subliminal areas — "the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain" perhaps mere biological memories activated within. Some derives from the immediate response to those myriad impressions which the mind selects from the welter of outward stimuli, according to that mind's practical or aesthetic need. It should be noted that, as the mind itself selects or rejects, so does the novelist as he chooses his data, artfully mimicking the haphazard thrust of the impressions of actual life, the patterns of emotional response. The furthest this method was to take a writer is the opening section of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury when the reader is plunged into the feelings of an idiot, receiving the confused impressions and associations which Benjy's moment brings. Yet Mrs. Woolf continually immerses the reader into just such situations. "What a lark! What a plunge!" Clarissa thinks at the opening of Mrs. Dalloway, and one is literally submerged into her consciousness, learning about her life only as she reveals it in seemingly random thoughts. These are well-sifted by the author. The reader, however, is conscious only of things as they are happening at the moment to Mrs. Dalloway. Much later, after he has finished the novel, he can mentally arrange the horizontal chronicle of her life. In the book he is vertically plunged into it, experiencing it himself.

The problems of this method — and "any method is right," Mrs. Woolf declares, "that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers" — are several, as she was only too quick to point out. With its emphasis on every perception, with its exclusion of "the alien and external," there is the danger of never venturing "outside itself and beyond." This is the predicament she feels Joyce himself assumed in Ulysses. The reader is centered in a self, "in a bright yet narrow room." In "A Letter to a Young Poet," she explains the problems of this self-containment as those of infolding, of creating the "private universe" with no doorway, the set of symbols decipherable to the writer alone.

In other words, what Mrs. Woolf is referring to is the relation of the reader to the work. For the novelist, the problem is one of rendering this new private vision to the public — of contemplating "landscapes and emotions within" and making them "visible to the world at large." For the reader, it is the problem of his own transaction with the spirit of his age. Like the novelist, he must be willing to forsake the old-fashioned "materialist" conceptions of fiction and enter a new subjective world which, familiar as it may be to his own experience, he has never encountered on the printed page. He must submit to a process of self-examination, of exploring unknown, perhaps tabooed, areas of himself; of participating rather than playing the role of the disinterested spectator. This makes great demands on the imagination and patience of the reader. But if he is willing to be creative, as Mrs. Woolf so often insists in her essays he must be, the transaction can be rewarding indeed.

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A final problem, which Mrs. Woolf exposes in her essays on women and fiction, most notably A Room of One's Own and "Professions for Women," concerns the relation of women writers to the spirit of the age. If the subjective novel would explore every atom of sensation, it must enter dark areas which the Victorians had never dared. For the feminine novelist, this offered obstacles; for, as Mrs. Woolf confessed, a woman still has a secret desire to be veiled. It was difficult to tell the truth about her body, to write about certain passions which she images as the largest fish to slumber in "the depths, the dark places" of the pool. If everything was the proper stuff of fiction, that "Angel in the House" — the feminine instinct to be pure, to hide the fact that you have a mind and body of your own — must be killed. It was especially difficult for Virginia Woolf inasmuch as she was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a man of Victorian morals who regarded Sterne as prurient and Balzac as unwholesome, and who felt that the highest art came from the "healthiest mind."