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

Sun Jul 31 08:56:09 EDT 2022

It is (pace Stuart) a risky business to dictate what is “possible” when it comes to reading anything, especially by Woolf. Yes, there is enormous pathos in Betty Flanders’s question, but it seem to me that her question can fairly described as curatorial. It is the question all those who have to “deal with” what is left behind must face. And shoes seem singularly challenging. What am I to do with these? Chuck ‘em? Put them on a shelf? Donate them? Give them to the local history museum? Wear them? I don’t know. It’s difficult.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about memorial culture, specifically in relation to the events known in the US as ‘9/11’ (see attached), and I doubt anything in Woolf is ever “simply one thing” (Ramsay, J.).

From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> On Behalf Of Christine Froula via Vwoolf
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2022 7:09 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] They're a' oot o' step but oor Jock

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 

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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