[Vwoolf] They're a' oot o' step but oor Jock

[Christine Froula]

Many thanks for your wonderful post, Stuart, so thoughtful and 
thought-provoking in regard to connections between private memorializing 
by way of relics left by the deceased and museum curation. Similar 
questions come into play in both domains at their respective scales: 
what to keep? what to toss? what to give away? what to show? what to 
pass on? In both domains, those who remember and value the deceased 
selectively invest meaning and value in objects that evoke the (natural; 
existential; human; social) time lived and experienced by the dead, with 
ND providing a hinge between them in depicting public (readers, 
historians, citizens, etc) and private (family, friends, heirs, etc) 
memories/memorials/sentimental journeys. Ditto for JR to the extent that 
the book itself is a public/published memorial to its actual 
inspiration, Thoby Stephen, as well as to the "lost generation"--all 
those young lives who marched into WWI; JR's s creation involved 
analogous analytic and selective practices, implicit in the invented 
"narrative mode which foregrounds the selection, artifice, and 
experience of the exhibited example". I agree that VW's depicted shoes 
and boots retain all the pathos of life lived in time, evoking all the 
life and time the wearer trudged through as memento mori and so much 
more, no less than Van Gogh's boots do, even when she's highlighting the 
persistence of objects beyond death and human contemplation thereof, as 
in the comic contrast between Katharine's bored custodianship and the 
American tourist's "dumb" contemplation. The pathos of Betty Flanders's 
gesture, Katharine's burden of ancestral fame, and the American pilgrim 
seems to me perfectly compatible with the material and cultural 
questions raised by public "museology" (wonderful word!--never used it 
before).

Christine

On 7/31/2022 5:17 AM, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf wrote:
> I recently read this article: NASH, John, "Exhibiting the Example: 
> Virginia Woolf's Shoes", Twentieth_Century_Literature, 2013, 
> LIX,2:283-308 “My focus is on Night and Day, Jacob’s Room and the 
> essays and reviews of literary ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍
> I recently read this article:
> NASH, John, "Exhibiting the Example: Virginia Woolf's Shoes", 
> Twentieth_Century_Literature, 2013, LIX,2:283-308
> “My focus is on Night and Day, Jacob’s Room and the essays and reviews 
> of literary
> tourism (or literary geography, as she also called it).
> “In these works, Woolf often associates shoes with particular museological
> contexts so that they become for her a kind of shorthand by which
> she questions practices of exhibition and exemplification—issues that go
> to the heart of her career-long concern with modes of representation
> and perception. Shoes feature less as personal memorials (heavy with the
> weight of pathos) and more as figures in a narrative mode which 
> foregrounds
> the selection, artifice, and experience of the exhibited example.”
> The author certainly knows his Woolf.  When we come to ND:
> ‘jadedness and disaffection
> now define Katharine’s relationship with the great men of the past;
> this time it is the visitor, an “American lady who had come to be shown
> the relics” (331), who singles out the slippers. “‘What! His very own
> slippers!’ Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped the old shoes,
> and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them” (333).
> The writers’ shoes have become the focus of a satire on the “sentimental
> journeys” (“Howarth” 5) of the literary tourist’s “dumb” admiration and
> despoiling “grasp.”’
> The scene is sufficiently extensive, providing enough material for us 
> to discuss/argue about Woolf’s “real” views about the relics of the 
> dead.  So, the scene can arguably fit the author’s contention.
> However, when we come to “Jacob’s Room”, all we have is:
> ‘“What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”
> ‘She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.’
> These are the last 2 lines of the book  There isn’t an immediate 
> Woolfian context for interpretation, except the whole book.
> The reader may be puzzled, of course.  Jacques-Émile Blanche recounted 
> that while staying at
> the Belgrave Hotel in London in 1925:
> “I had left some of my papers and books in the reading-room when I was 
> called away
> to answer a telephone call. [. . .] When I returned I found two women 
> turning over
> the pages of a book that belonged to me. One of them was saying to the 
> other: ‘Can
> you make anything of it? Have you heard of the writer? It really makes 
> you think
> you’ve gone off your head! Was that boy Jacob killed in the War? And 
> what’s all that
> about *boots*?”
> Nonetheless, critics are generally agreed that this is a moment of 
> pathos, or, as Nash puts it, there is “a long critical history in Woolf
> studies which emphasizes metonymy and pathos in the closing scene.”  
> He specifically names Bill Brown, Alex Zwerdling, Laura Marcus, and 
> Robert Reginio.
> Instead, he argues “against this critical consensus ... Instead, this 
> essay asks *why* shoes came to seem so important
> to Woolf and finds the answer in her critique of literary tourism.”
> This is all very well, but no one reading JR for even the umpteenth 
> time could possibly deduce from the text that when Mrs Flanders asks, 
> “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”, there could possibly be a 
> hidden critique of ‘museology’. You may use JR as yet another example 
> of Woolf’s fascination with shoes and boots, but it is absurd to 
> gainsay the pathos of the last 2 lines of the novel.  You don’t have 
> to be persuaded by the pathos, but what can be intended by Woolf 
> except some form of pathos?
> Stuart
>
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