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<p>Looking through some old notes I came across this, taken from
James Naremore's 1973 book <i>The World Without a Self: Virginia
Woolf and the Novel</i>. Naremore quotes a celebrated sentence
from Woolf's "Modern Fiction" essay: "Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us
trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in
appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness." He comments that the sentence "has been quoted out
of context over and over again to describe her technique. In its
proper context, however, it is clear that the passage is an
abstract of what Virginia Woolf thinks Joyce's method tells us.
She herself was seldom predisposed to "record the atoms as they
fall." She rather dislikes such a method, and she explains why a
few lines later: [quotes from "Is it the method" to "into the
bargain"] (p. 72)<br>
</p>
<p>I wondered whether the sentence was still being taken as a
description by Woolf of her own method, or of a method that she
recommended, and so carried out a quick Google search. To be fair,
a good number of commentators correctly noted that Woolf was not
describing her own compositional method or recommended principles.
But many persist in asserting that this was indeed what Woolf was
doing. The following are representative (I have changed the
wording slightly so as not to enable the identification of
specific individuals).<br>
</p>
<p>* . . . her own instructions to her fellow modern novelists in
"Modern Fiction": "Let us record the atoms as they fall . . . upon
the consciousness."</p>
<p>* Woolf asks that the novelist should "record record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall”"<br>
</p>
<p>*. . . she seeks an art than comes "closer to life," that tries
to capture what life is really like: "let us record the atoms . .
. upon the consciousness"<br>
</p>
<p>* Novelists, Woolf stated, should "record the atoms as they fall
upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the
pattern, however disconnected and incoherent…"<br>
</p>
<p>* "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall," she advised<br>
</p>
<p>* Woolf called on the novelist to find new ways to represent
consciousness: "Let us record etc etc"<br>
</p>
<p>* Woolf insists that writers must instead "record the atoms as
they fall upon etc etc"<br>
</p>
<p>I think that Naremore must be pretty irritated that 47 years
later critics are still making the same mistake.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Jeremy H<br>
</p>
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