Fiction Review: "Blue & Green," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Virginia Woolf contemplates colors, asking the reader to consider them in tangible and intangible form, as well as from objective and subjective points-of-view.

“Blue & Green” features Virginia Woolf in her prose-poem mold. There’s no significant narrative content; the piece is a meditation on the perceptions of color. Woolf specifically focuses on color being experienced in both tangible and intangible forms. Tangible color includes the appearance of animals, such as green feathers or blue skin. The examples of intangible color Woolf describes are the heat mirages above desert sand, as well as the image of light refracted through the stained glass of a chandelier. The immediate impression of the piece is that it is a cataloging of how color takes diverse forms.

Woolf, though, is too sophisticated to waste a reader’s time with something as simplistic as a list. She also emphasizes that the experience of color is as relative as it is diverse. She uses blue details to heighten the reader’s sense of a great fish’s strength as it swims through the sea, which she then juxtaposes with the use of the color to render its pathos while it lies dead and rotting on a beach. Colors are also depicted as relative to themselves: the light refracted through the glass can be either blue or green depending on the time of day.

Woolf is also sophisticated enough to give the piece a clear structure, having it move from objective to subjective perceptions. The examples of color in the opening half, such as the light seen through chandelier glass, carry no emotional inflections; they’re of color experienced coolly and impersonally, an effect Woolf heightens by including a bracketed description of birds squawking. Sounds, like emotions, carry shock and immediacy; objective perception simply is. By definition, it stands apart. However, there’s no standing apart from the images of the fish’s life and death that take up most of the second half. Woolf means for the reader to identify with the fish in both its glory and degradation. We see the light refracted through glass; we feel the fish’s experience of life and death. The subjective takes over from the objective.

And in the final sentence, the subjective gives way to the ambiguous. The renderings of the fish prompt a straightforward emotional response. Woolf, though, closes with an image of a cathedral’s interior, and one doesn’t know whether to experience it as a description of peacefulness or oppression. One is inclined towards the latter, but one isn’t quite sure: Woolf pointedly says the feeling to be evoked is different from that of the beached fish. My own thought is that the cathedral is intended as an image of strength, but not one like that of the swimming fish. The fish in its life evokes joyous awe; the cathedral is a presence that--perhaps--inspires fear. However, one can also take the cathedral as an image of permanence; the fish’s glory, in contrast, is fleeting. I suppose the insight one is to take away is that colors carry many meanings, including ones that can’t quite be sorted out.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "A Haunted House"
• "Kew Gardens"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "A Society"
• "The String Quartet"
• "An Unwritten Novel"

Fiction Review: "The String Quartet," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

In “The String Quartet” (1921), Virginia Woolf went beyond simply trying to render the experience of music in stream-of-consciousness terms; she renders the narrator’s state of mind while listening. Along the way, she raises questions about the nature of that experience. Is it aesthetic and recreational, or is it simply a means of escapism? In the end, she answers in favor of the latter. The experience of art has become a respite from the disappointments and alienation of contemporary life.

Woolf begins the story with a string of impressions, much in the way that defined “Monday or Tuesday” and took up the bulk of “An Unwritten Novel.” There’s no rhyme or reason to them from the narrator’s standpoint. She reflects on the various means of transportation to the music recital she is attending, followed by a cataloguing of the minutiae of the news and local hubbub: international treaties, the flu this year, the weather. The impressions then shift from a general contemplation of the outside world to the particulars of the scene at the recital. The narrator considers the snippets of small talk around her, and she cannot help but feel that something is lacking. One thing leads to another, but it never seems to end in fulfillment. She muses:

It’s all a matter of flats and hats and sea gulls, or so it seems to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit passive on a gilt chair, only turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if I’m not mistaken, that we’re all recalling something, furtively seeking something.

The narrator can impose no order on her thoughts, as she has no passion for the moment, and the worthwhile is unknown and beyond her grasp.

But if order cannot come from within, it is found without. The quartet begins their recital, and the narrator gives herself over to the thoughts the music brings to mind. It is romantic imagery she sees, beginning with thoughts of nature and giving way to fantasies of princes and swordfights and chases through the castle. Chatter from the audience disturbs her, but only briefly. She dismisses it. “The tongue is but a clapper,” she thinks. The scene in the recital hall has taken on a new grace:

The feathers in the hat next me are bright and pleasing as a child’s ratthe. The leaf on the plane-tree flashes green through the chink in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting.

The music provides structure, and if the structure is agreeable, everything in the context it provides becomes comfortable. Unfortunately, that structure dissipates once the music is done. When that happens, the narrator’s feelings of alienation and the inadequacy of life assert themselves more strongly than ever.. On the street outside, she passes by someone who asks, “You go this way?” Her reply is a resigned “Alas. I go that.” Her own life holds no promise for her.

One surmises that Woolf’s point may be that while structure is a necessity for a fulfilling life, it has to be a structure rooted in passion; the structure created by a routinized existence simply won’t do. The latter creates a chaos. Alienation is a mindset of rejection; it doesn’t organize or build, and the consequence is experience treated like detritus, a notion that Woolf dramatizes brilliantly in the story’s opening paragraphs. The enjoyment of art in such a context cannot be a celebration of aesthetic achievement. Art has become the escape from modern alienation; it provides the passion-based structure missing from modern daily life.

The challenge for Woolf as an artist is to find a structure that captures both the joy of music and the disappointment of contemporary life. Her solution was an elegant one; she creates a counterpoint between the two. The opening paragraphs render the alienation of the narrator, and they build the reader’s sense of it quite effectively—one moves from the alienation from life in general to alienation from the particulars of the scene at the recital. Then the music comes in, with the narrator’s thoughts developing from a Wordsworthian love of nature to the sentimental Pre-Raphaelite fantasies of chivalric life long ago. Romanticism defines her mindset, with her musings taking on a progression that has history’s imprimatur. It is a clever touch by Woolf. If one is going to identify a pattern of wayward thinking with an aesthetic approach, why not have it develop along the same lines as the art? Getting back to the development of the story, Woolf moves from the presentation of the music to directly playing it off the thoughts of alienation; the irritating voices of the other audience members punctuate the narrator’s music-inspired reveries. Most impressively, the reveries transform them. As the narrator puts it, “I say all’s been settled; yes, laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves.” And when the fantasies reach their crescendo, the story comes full circle, and the narrator finds herself back in the alienating world away from the melodies. Woolf renders alienation and the escapist power of art by creating a prose symphony that dramatizes both.

“The String Quartet” is modernism at its finest. It captures the experience of modern life, doing so through the dramatization of a single perspective with all its idiosyncrasies on full display. Effects are built more through juxtaposition than traditional cathartic structure; the story’s elements are collaged and orchestrated. I cannot quite bring myself to say that it matches the achievements of her greatest novels, but among her short fiction it definitely stands out.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "Blue & Green"
• "A Haunted House"
• "Kew Gardens"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "A Society"
• "An Unwritten Novel"

Fiction Review: "Monday or Tuesday," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Virginia Woolf’s short 1921 piece “Monday or Tuesday” is generally described as a prose poem. Some, though, feel it is better characterized as a prose collage. They don’t feel Woolf sought to illustrate any ideas or create any larger narrative meaning. In their view, the piece functions like a writerly version of a collage painting. The point was to create abstract, non-narrative effects through the juxtaposition of unrelated elements.

My reaction upon reading it is that I don’t agree, largely because the juxtapositions illustrate the same thing: the contrast of light and darkness, of seeing and not-seeing. In the framing paragraphs, for example, these are present in Woolf’s rendering of the heron’s perceptions in flight. The opening paragraph includes the lines “A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect--the sun gold on its slopes.” The closing paragraph ends with “the sky veils the stars; then bares them.” In both instances, a moment of darkness is followed by a moment of light. An author does not present similar contrasts in different ways unless he or she is working towards a larger point.

The juxtapositions are not as obvious in the four middle paragraphs, largely because Woolf only explicitly renders the light: “light sheds gold scales”; “the firelight darkening and making the room red”; “Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners”; and “space rushes blue and stars glint.” The idea of darkness is there, though. Woolf closes three of the four paragraphs with the word “truth,” or more specifically, “truth?” Truth is an obvious analogue for light, and one infers from the accompanying question mark that the narrator is not certain if light/truth has been achieved in the impressions the paragraphs render. Darkness is suggested, but not shown, although its presence may be clearer if one equates darkness with another form of not-seeing, that of confusion.

The contrast of truth with confusion also leads one to another analogue of “truth” and “light”: the notion of “understanding.” However, it is hard to see how the idea of “understanding” fits into the overall. Understanding is a term for intellect asserting authority over perception--giving it a context--and that doesn’t occur anywhere in the piece. The narrator’s perspective has little sense of a larger whole to which the catalogued perceptions belong. The framing perspective of the heron doesn’t understand what it sees, either, but the references to the bird being “absorbed in itself” and “indifferent” emphasize that it doesn’t care. It just accepts what it sees, and this is what the narrator recognizes that he or she is doing as well. The middle passages end, before the heron returns, with the words “truth? or now, content with closeness?” The narrator asks, “Do I understand, or do I just accept what is before me?” It can also be read as, “Should I understand, or should I just accept?” Being content is synonymous with acceptance, and happy acceptance at that.

Woolf uses the juxtaposition of the narrator’s perspective with the heron’s to create a deeper understanding of the latter. The simplicity of the bird’s point of view is highlighted. It sees and not-sees, it experiences moments of darkness and light, but it doesn’t concern itself with understanding. It is just “content with closeness,” the condition of perception with acceptance that the narrator ultimately approaches. Creating this epiphany would appear to be the purpose of “Monday or Tuesday,” and that realization of meaning is what makes it a poem instead of a collage. Its contrasts create understanding, not effects for which understanding is beside the point.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "Blue & Green"
• "A Haunted House"
• "Kew Gardens"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "A Society"
• "The String Quartet"
• "An Unwritten Novel"

Fiction Review: "A Society," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The text of "A Society," by Virginia Woolf, can be read by clicking here.

Like most accomplished artists of the last century or so, Virginia Woolf worked in a number of modes. Her dominant side was her experimental one, which employed innovative uses of wordplay and character perspective, and which resulted in her most impressive work. The novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are what immediately come to mind. But she was also a witty satirist of gender relations, roles, and status. This was Woolf at her most accessible and popular; if one meets a person who has read only one book by her, her semi-autobiographical feminist narrative A Room of One’s Own is the work that is invariably (and most fondly) mentioned.

Her 1921 short story “A Society” appears, at first, to be cut from much the same cloth as A Room of One’s Own. There’s little of the modernist approach to construction and effect that characterizes most of her major fiction; one can’t imagine anybody complaining about the story being incomprehensible or exceedingly arty. It starts off as a breezy, good-natured satire on gender roles. Woolf engages in a bit of her trademark leitmotif approach to words and phrases, but she keeps it in service to jokes, which is all but guaranteed to keep every reader on board. But the comic aspects of the early parts serve two purposes: they also provide a devastating set-up for the harsh ironies of the story’s latter sections, in which the entertaining absurdism of Woolf’s gender satire shifts into tragedy.

The story opens with a tea party. The attendees are all young women, and they’re completely caught up in thoughts of men; they can’t wait to get married and have children of their own. However, one of them, Poll, breaks down crying while listening to the others rhapsodizing. Poll is the most eccentric of the group--the one considered least likely to get married--but she’s not crying over her prospects. Her father has left her a fortune in his will, but only on the condition that she read every book in the London Library. She has done her best to comply, but she can’t take it anymore; most books, as she puts it, are “unutterably bad.” She reads passages from several works to overcome her friends’ skepticism, and the group comes to the realization that men may not be living up to their end of the social contract. As the narrator says, “the objects of life were to produce good people and good books.” The women create a society of their own; its goal is to go out in the world and see how men are living up to their responsibilities, such as running things and writing the books. And until they are satisfied that they know how well the men “have borne the books” and whatnot, they will not bear any children.

This leads to a number of entertaining vignettes. There’s the encounter with the ship captain who has, shall one say, idiosyncratic notions about corporal punishment. (The bit is like something barely cleaned-up from Anaïs Nin.) One of the women tries to understand the nature of judges, only to be left unsure if they are men or a whole other species of animal. Another takes her measure of a number of Oxbridge professors, who are so caught up with their goofy obsessions that she can’t imagine them producing anything of value--and these are who the culture entrusts to cultivate men. The suspicions created by the passages Poll read for them in the opening scene seem all but confirmed. Men’s pretensions exist for the knowledgeable woman’s laughter.

Woolf’s tone, though, shifts at this point. Others in the society outline men’s achievements in the world, such as the remarkably sophisticated operations of government and business. There’s no room for derision there. And an especially discordant note is struck when one of the women, who has posed as a book reviewer, can’t offer any kind of coherent report on the state of contemporary literature--her thoughts drift back to mundane pleasures and the vicarious joy in a colleague’s having his raised his sons in style. The women don’t know what to make of her comment that “the truth has nothing to do with literature.” And they certainly don’t know what to make of the cheers for a declaration of war that come from the streets outside. Rollicking humor has given way to feelings of unease, confusion, and dread.

The final section of the story is a dialogue between two of the women some years later. One has come to the conclusion that the women were better off in their ignorance--everyone is better off in their ignorance. At best, knowledge only makes humanity clever without substance; at worst, knowledge is joined with substance--with concrete goals--which leads to the suffering of war. Paradise was in not knowing anything at all. Woolf never makes or alludes to the analogy of Eve and the apple, but the resonance of the Hebrew myth in this story is inescapable. Knowledge walks hand in hand with horror.

And one realizes that the story isn’t feminist in the way one traditionally thinks of. Its point of view is not patriarchal--Woolf treats war as the culminating sin in that manner of thought, and it is a sin she clearly feels is alien to the female mind. However, in "A Society," she is not advocating that women step beyond their roles in the patriarchal structure. She’s not of the view that they can’t, but that they will ultimately reach a point where they wish they hadn’t. It’s an odd sort of feminist notion: women, unlike men, have the capacity to understand that it is ultimately better not to know. Knowledge is power, but ignorance is security. Hm.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "Blue & Green"
• "A Haunted House"
• "Kew Gardens"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "The String Quartet"
• "An Unwritten Novel"

Fiction Review: "A Haunted House," Virginia Woolf

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The text of "A Haunted House," by Virginia Woolf, can be read by clicking here.

The technique of "close reading" was created by critics such as F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks. It's not a coincidence that it came to the fore in the wake of High Modernism. If one didn't engage in "close reading" of authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or William Faulkner, one couldn't read them at all. Old techniques such as reading for the plot result in one getting to the bottom of the first page of one of these writers' works and saying, "Huh?" I had this experience again when reading Woolf's brief 1921 story "A Haunted House" the other day. I hadn't sat down with a piece of high-modernist writing in five years, and I was confronted with how slothful a reader I'd become in the interim. I know from experience that writers such as Woolf aren't incomprehensible; one simply needs to rise to the occasion of reading them. "A Haunted House," which runs just shy of 700 words, is an excellent place to start getting one's discipline back.

A key difference between Woolf and other, more conventional writers is that she doesn't introduce elements simply for the sake of setting a scene. If she describes a room as having a chair, it's not the only time one is going to read about that chair. She'll return to it again and again, looking at it in a new way each time. She does this with every item, idea, or phrase she introduces, building her effects and the stories through the juxtapositions of the various elements and the development that comes from returning to and elaborating on them. Woolf's pieces are most aptly compared to symphonies: she introduces and reintroduces themes, juxtaposing them to create unisons and discords, which she ultimately builds to a crescendo.

"A Haunted House" tells of the experience a young couple (particularly the wife) have with a ghostly couple that haunts their home. In the second sentence, Woolf describes the ghosts with, "From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure [...]" Woolf plays with the word "here" in what follows: "'Here we left it,' she said. And he added, 'Oh, but here too!' 'It's upstairs,' she murmured." Woolf leaves the word "here" undefined, but the repetitions give it emphasis and signify its importance. She also introduces the word "it," which is left undefined, too, and the repetitions signify this word's importance as well. The story progresses through the development of the elements--the themes--of the words "here" and "it."

Woolf carries the reader along by defining everywhere "here" both is and is not. The ghostly couple find "it" and "here" in the garden, in the drawing room, and in the home's upstairs. But the wife, who narrates, can find neither in these places. "My hands were empty," she says repeatedly. Woolf creates a mystery: What is the "it," and how can many places be "here," if "here" is where "it" is? As the story progresses, we learn that the "it" is a "buried treasure," another vague reference, ostensibly concrete, that turns out to be just as abstract as "it." Woolf develops the reader's sense of the "treasure" and its value as the story continues. The piece climaxes when both "it and "here" are defined: the narrator realizes what they refer to in the final sentence.

Woolf ends on an epiphanic note, and it's a particularly modernist epiphany: one achieves a higher understanding by adding a different perspective to one's own. The narrator adds the ghosts' perspective to her view of things, and she's left with a greater understanding of "it" and "here" and "treasure." Woolf implicitly has her narrator also recognize that feelings and sentiments are at least as valuable as material wealth. The story is a fine (re)introduction to the world of modernism: it demands the utmost attention on the part of the reader, reality is defined through many eyes, and it explores abstraction and the adventures of the mind. My reading life has definitely been poorer over the last five years.


Other reviews of works by Virginia Woolf

• "Blue & Green"
• "Kew Gardens"
• "The Mark on the Wall"
• "Monday or Tuesday"
• "A Society"
• "The String Quartet"
• "An Unwritten Novel"