[Vwoolf] involuntary memory in Woolf

[Jeannette Smyth]

Ohhh, good one. Hermione Lee points to Woolf's process of somatization in Lee's intro to On Being Ill.

Far from being an ethereal, chill, disembodied writer, she is always transforming thoughts and feelings and ideas into bodily metaphors. She writes with acute - often extremely troubling - precision about how the body mediates and controls our life stories. Body parts are strewn all over her pages. Rage and embarrassment are felt in the thighs; a headache can turn into a whole autobiography; dressing up the body is an epic ordeal; and a clenched fist, feet in a pair of boots, the flash of a dress or the fingertip feel of a creature in a salt-water pool, can speak volumes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/dec/18/classics.virginiawoolf

And the Pericles Lewis piece referred to in yesterday's colloquy refers to the sensuality (somatization?) with which Woolf responded to Proust:

Although she is only reading the first volume, she compares it to a “miracle” and asks:
How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished—My martyrdom is over.11
(Letter to Roger Fry, 10/3/22)

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/documents/LewisWoolfandProust.pdf 

Thank you.
Jeannette Smyth


On Oct 11, 2012, at 7:22 AM, Jeremy Hawthorn wrote:

> In Woolf the body as well as the mind remembers things. Cf this from The Waves:
> 
> In the beginning, there was the nursery, with windows opening on to a garden, and beyond that the sea.  I saw something brighten – no doubt the brass handle of a cupboard. Then Mrs Constable raised the sponge above her head, squeezed it, and out shot, right, left, all down the spine, arrows of sensation. And so, as long as we draw breath, for the rest of time, if we knock against a chair, a table, or a woman, we are pierced with arrows of sensation – if we walk in a garden, if we drink this wine.  Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge over that new body.
> 
> Jeremy Hawthorn
> 
> 
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Jeannette Smyth
jeannette_smyth at earthlink.net
1522 San Patricio Ave. SW
Albuquerque, N.M. 87104



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