[Vwoolf] Number 1 misreading of Woolf?

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

Looking through some old notes I came across this, taken from James 
Naremore's 1973 book /The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the 
Novel/. 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)

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).

* . . . her own instructions to her fellow modern novelists in "Modern 
Fiction": "Let us record the atoms as they fall . . . upon the 
consciousness."

* Woolf asks that the novelist should "record record the atoms as they 
fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall”"

*. . . 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"

* 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…"

* "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in 
which they fall," she advised

* Woolf called on the novelist to find new ways to represent 
consciousness: "Let us record etc etc"

* Woolf insists that writers must instead "record the atoms as they fall 
upon etc etc"

I think that Naremore must be pretty irritated that 47 years later 
critics are still making the same mistake.


Jeremy H

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