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

Sun Jul 31 12:50:57 EDT 2022

Thanks Stuart, Mark and Christine for starting the stimulating conversation
on Jacob's shoes and Anne Marie Batzinger for the moving historization of
shoes of Jews in Hungary (I also remember abandoned piles in railway cars
in the Holocaust Museum). Indeed, shoes are not "one thing." It reminds me
of Proust's remark in *Swann's Way* about the importance of certain
"material objects" in life:

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to
recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past
is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in
some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give
us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we
come upon this object before we ourselves must die (59-60).

And so it is with Woolf: she has reached out into the past and found a
material object revelatory of Jacob's life--his shoes--in which he has
lived his days in Cambridge, the war, middle-class life. Just as the shoes
are "empty" of Jacob--"She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes"--so is the
"shawl" of Mrs. Ramsay. It  once "soothed" the children when cast over
the skull, or improved the look of the shabby house, or protected Rose or
warmed herself.: it protected the family. But after Prue's death, the
protection, "the fold of the shawl loosened," and when Mrs. McNab sees it
in the ruined house, the shawl "loosened"--its protection of the family,
the house, indeed, the nation--"and swung to and fro ."

Pat Laurence

On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 7:09 AM Christine Froula via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> 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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