[Vwoolf] Interwar Woolf criticism

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

The quotations Stuart provides from George Sampson reminded me a little 
of the pages devoted to Virginia Woolf in R. D Charques's 1933 study 
/Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution/, which must be among the 
first volumes of (semi-)Marxist literary criticism published in England.

Charques seems to be torn between his sense that he should not like and 
admire Woolf's work, and his experience that he does - a mixed reaction 
that may be detected in other Marxist studies of Woolf (Arnold Kettle's 
essay on Woolf in his book on the novel, for example). Thus Charques 
deplores what he perceives as Woolf's detachment from ordinary life. 
"Mrs. Woolf's is a reticent and rarified sympathy: she has her 
novelist's being somewhere in the heights of contemplative fantasy. She 
skims as lightly as a bird - as lightly as Clarissa Dalloway with her 
touch of the jay about her - over the ordinary preoccupations of men and 
women."

Not surprisingly, he approves of her case in /A Room of One’s Own/: 
"'Intellectual freedom,' Mrs. Woolf concludes briefly, 'depends upon 
material things.' Who will demur, and where is truth to be found if not 
here. But Mrs. Woolf's novels leave only the narrowest opening for truth 
of this kind to enter. They enclose a hundred virtues other than the 
most prosaic. Mention ignorance, dirt, vulgarity, want – and the serene 
and lovely world of her making vanishes, as though a bubble had burst. 
There is no place in it for commonplace reality, for the crude strife of 
material desires, for the harshness and bitterness of class struggle."

At the same time, he seems left with a nagging love for the novels that 
he feels forced to admit to. "It may seem at best superfluous to 
introduce theories of literature into the serene and illuminated world 
of Mrs. Woolf's invention; and certainly theories, which are apt to be 
two a penny at most times, can do little to enhance its magic or explain 
it away. The attempt to apply a political yardstick to /Orlando/ or /The 
Waves/ may well suggest an inability to take any pleasure in them. For 
it is a pleasure of a peculiarly unmixed kind that these novels offer. 
If we forget everything that the poets and the metaphysicians have said 
about beauty, it is in /Orlando/ or /The Waves/ that we get an 
impression of beauty that is quite complete and self-contained. Truth 
and the rest of the hierarchy of æsthetic values have nothing to do with 
it, and poetry as a criticism of life seems a rather empty maxim."

Moreover, and somewhat contradictorily, Woolf's detachment from 
"ordinary preoccupations" (see above) does not mean that she is not a 
realist: "Not, that is to say, that Mrs. Woolf is without a strong 
literary vein of realism. She has, to begin with, an instinctive and 
very humorous eye for character. The little roomfull of miniatures in 
the pages of each of her novels is vivid with the colours of life." 
(Pleased that he recognizes Woolf's humour: not all of her readers do.)

He finds /To the Lighthouse/ "the lovliest of her books and Mrs. Ramsay 
the nearest and most intimately communicated of her characters. In the 
other novels there is more light than warmth; the fineness and 
playfulness of Mrs. Woolf's sensibility seems to restrict passion. Lit 
by a strange splendour of poetry, /The Waves/ is in an obvious sense 
very remote from human circumstance, and it almost defeats its purpose 
as a result. Life there has been abstracted of all its material reality 
and only a metaphysical essence remains."

I have always thought that /The Waves/ is one of the finest depictions 
of passion in English literature, but perhaps I am reading things in to 
the text . . . And if material reality involves the body's reaction to 
physical things, then surely /The Waves/ is full of it.

Jeremy H

-- 
Jeremy Hawthorn
Emeritus Professor
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
7491 Trondheim
Norway

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