[Vwoolf] Number 1 misreading of Woolf?

Thu May 21 17:52:40 EDT 2020

The shower of atoms may be the condition of modernity, but the author’s
method makes the condition apparent in art. The new ground is accessed by
the modern fiction writer’s approach. Indeed much of what Woolf is talking
about are authors’ methodologies, the ways by which they construct their
work: as you point out, Pat, invoking smallness versus largeness, the
myriad versus the singular, freedom versus constraint. The spiritualists
have one method (or set of methods), the materialists, another.

As I said, I think that ultimately Woolf suggests that both work because
anything works so long as the product isn’t false or somehow divorced from,
quoting Fry here, “the artist’s vision.” As Woolf writes in the essay in
question, “Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what
we wish to express.”

Yes, wasn’t the 1919 version published in the *Times Literary Supplement*?
Very much an opportunity for Woolf to enter into a dialogue not just with
herself but a larger circle.

On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 1:27 PM Pat Laurence via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> I agree with Christine that the shower of “atoms” (sensations,
> impressions) as they fall upon the mind is the condition of modernity.
> Change, flux, movement. And it is left to Joyce and Woolf (in Woolf's broad
> stroke), as Mark & Jeremy note to be the “spiritualists”—those who look
> inward to capture the flow and flux --in opposition to those who look
> outward, the static “materialists” Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. This not
> a “method," but it is part of the “new ground” of the “proper stuff of
> fiction.” What has always interested me about this essay is Woolf’s
> foregrounding of the concept of “smallness” or minimalism as she challenges
> the maximal notion “that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought
> large rather than what is thought small.” Life exists more fully in the
> tiny “atoms” that fall upon the mind; it is in impressions that may be
> “trivial.” She begins here to shift the ground of modern fiction” from
> large events, go-ahead plot, outward character or even the cultural
> “loudspeaker” voice of war or the sensational. We are introduced instead to
> Woolf’s notion that there’s an importance, even a wildness, that is
> contained in the “small.” Or as she suggests in “On Being Ill,” in coping
> with the unknown territory of disease—let’s say droplets in Covid-19—that
> makes us re-think what is “big” and what is “small.” [not sure of accuracy
> of quotations, I don’t have access to my books].
>
> Pat Laurence
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 3:35 PM Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>
>> I think it also helps to think of the essay (especially in its initial
>> 1919 version) as a gambit in the debate going on about fiction and
>> character in the 1920s. Also, trying to identify nuggets of truth in Woolf
>> is like trying to pick up mercury with one’s fingers (which is a strong
>> memory from schooldays in the chemistry lab!).
>>
>> And, as Jeremy suggests, “spiritual” is deployed as an antonym for
>> “materialist” in Woolf’s taxonomy of writers; it can be substituted by any
>> number of other terms (endlessly deferred, as Derrida—*pace*
>> Stuart—might say).
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Michael Schrimper <Michael.Schrimper at colorado.edu>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, May 21, 2020 1:57 PM
>> *To:* Jeremy Hawthorn <jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no>; cfroula at northwestern.edu
>> *Cc:* mhussey at verizon.net; Woolf Listserv <
>> vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
>> *Subject:* Re: [Vwoolf] Number 1 misreading of Woolf?
>>
>>
>>
>> Like any decent essay since Montaigne, this one in question wanders. At
>> times it contradicts itself. In my view Woolf ultimately proposes that
>> “everything is the proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks;
>> whatever one honestly feels.” And the modern fiction writer can do
>> anything, use whatever method they choose, in order to achieve this
>> honesty, the emptying out of falsity.
>>
>>
>>
>> This proposal at the conclusion of the essay would be an endorsement of
>> the collection of atoms method, then, but it would also open up Woolf’s
>> support of all other kinds of methods; the idea is to rebuke falsity.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think that the levels of contradiction we see in this essay show that
>> Woolf really used this essay as an opportunity to think.
>>
>>
>>
>> In regard to Woolf’s own relation to the moderns of whom she speaks, the
>> way that the essay collects its thoughts as it goes, no matter how they
>> will be negated later (the proper stuff of fiction is X; there is no proper
>> stuff), itself is illustrative of the collection of atoms method; all
>> impressions are recorded.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Michael R. Schrimper
>>
>> Ph.D. Student, Department of English
>>
>> University of Colorado Boulder
>>
>> Traditional Territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations
>>
>> https://www.colorado.edu/english/michael-schrimper
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 2:25 AM Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf <
>> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On 18.05.2020 14:58, mhussey at verizon.net wrote:
>>
>> I don’t quite agree with Naremore here. Woolf mentions Joyce as ‘the most
>> notable’ of ‘several young writers’ who are chafing at convention, and I
>> think it is reasonable to see herself as implicitly included among those
>> ‘young writers’. Her complaint about Joyce is more specific; his
>> (narrative) ‘self’ ‘never embraces or creates what is outside itself and
>> beyond’, he lays a ‘didactic’ emphasis upon indecency.  I don’t think those
>> writers you quote are taking the lines from ‘Modern Fiction’ out of
>> context, and it seems to me reasonable to take the essay (in both its 1919
>> and 1925 iterations) as a modernist manifesto, though not necessarily as a
>> recipe for how to make a Woolf novel.
>>
>>
>>
>> Well this and Christine Froula's response sent me back to reread "Modern
>> Fiction" - which I have now done more than once. One conclusion I am sure
>> of: Woolf does not "advise," or "instruct" or "insist" (all verbs used by
>> the critics who I quoted) that the novelist "record the atoms &c &c." In
>> the closing lines of the essay she writes: "nothing - no 'method', no
>> experiment, even of the wildest - is forbidden, but only falsity and
>> pretence. 'The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the
>> proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of
>> brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss."
>>
>> But does she include herself among the "young writers, among whom Mr
>> James Joyce is the most notable" whose work contains a quality that
>> distinguishes it from that of their predecessors? This is a more difficult
>> question. To me, her criticism of Joyce in the essay would suggest that she
>> does not, as does her praise of Conrad, Hardy, Sterne, Chekhov and
>> Thackeray. Taken together, this means that she criticises quite strongly
>> the only representative of the "young writers" that she names, while
>> asserting the superiority of the work of five pre-modern writers to his
>> fiction.
>>
>> Taking up Christine Froula's question, I admit to being puzzled by "the
>> spiritual Mr Joyce," especially when his work fails because of "the
>> comparative poverty of his mind." He is spiritual because "he is concerned
>> at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which
>> flashes its messages through the brain." I take it that "spiritual" is
>> chosen to distinguish him from the "materialists" from whom she distances
>> herself; Joyce is not interested in objects outside the self but in
>> processes inside it. But it is an odd use of "spiritual."
>>
>> Incidentally, Woolf's complaint about the emphasis on indecency in Joyce
>> is somewhat at odds with her praise of Sterne. In his introduction to
>> Sterne's *A Sentimental Journey* (Penguin edition, 2001), Paul Goring
>> quotes Woolf's view that with Sterne "we are as close to life as we can
>> be," notes her praise of Sterne's "many passages of . . . pure poetry," and
>> references her quotation from the Paris scenes in Sterne's work. But Goring
>> notes that Woolf appears to be completely oblivious of the succession of
>> sexual innuendos in the passage she quotes to illustrate Sterne's "pure
>> poetry."
>>
>> Jeremy H
>>
>>
>>
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