Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction (2)
“That there is a poetic element in Virginia Woolf’s writing,” I wrote in June, to celebrate Dalloway Day 2022, “is hardly a new thought.” And I went on to speak of Woolf’s short fiction, citing different stories in Monday or Tuesday.
However I might more correctly have said poetic elements, given the fact that poetry employs different strategies. My citation, in the June post, of one story in Monday or Tuesday, “Kew Gardens,” brought out an ekphrastic description:
From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.
But of course description may be more or less ekphrastic and is only one sort of writing element, present in some, not perhaps all poetry. Others include rhythm, rhyme, metaphor, assonance. Metaphor is a constant in language use, so common that it’s difficult sometimes to say whether it is present or not.
However 2022 also marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Obviously these three works utilize metaphor in various ways. But for the sake of space, and staying with Woolf for the time being, perhaps a look at the way Jacob’s Room makes a metaphor of the British Museum as if it were a mind or brain will be useful in celebration of the centenary. Woolf says, in section IX of the novel:
Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, “Let me in! Let me in!”
However we wish to classify writing like this, calling it poetry, calling it prose, or prose poetry, I think it calls for reading. For re-reading!
