Dalloway Day 2023

 

I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.

 

More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,

 

One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.

 

And when we start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer. But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile one. Happy Dalloway Day!

Virginia Woolf's poetic fiction

 

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!

Repetition

 

Repetition and its importance, physically, mentally. From birth onward. The importance of the calendar in human activities makes it impossible not to reconsider repetition. But I’ve returned to it, in this case, with thoughts about the celebration of world days, centennials, and the like. Specifically, the literary side of 2022 as the centenary of  book publications, certainly a high point of Anglophone Modernism. Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, in reverse alphabetical order, published Jacob’s Room, Ulysses, The Waste Land in 1922, three years after the peace accord to the First World War was signed. But these are only three of the events that happened 100 years ago. And, as indicated, I’ve mentioned only a specific temporal and linguistic category. Specific dates: JR: 26 October 1922. TWL: October 1922. U: 2 February 1922 (previously serialized in The Little Review, March 1918-December 1920.

Related to Dalloway Day

I wrote, on or about 12 May, that I wanted to encourage people to participate in this year’s Dalloway Day by writing, drawing, making music, in order to promote the achievements of Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues.  Since that time I’ve found, through the writer Gretchen Gerzina, that Swann Auction Galleries, a company specializing in rare and antiquarian books, has a number of publications by Woolf, many of these first editions. So it seems to me good to mention this for the purpose not only of adding book collecting to my short list of activities related to Dalloway Day but also to call attention to ways in which adaptations of one kind of poetry—in the ample sense of the word—can spur work in other kinds. Woolf’s comment that “painting and writing have much to tell each other” has been cited so often that I almost hesitate to repeat it here. However, oft quoted and perhaps obvious as it may be, it serves as an indication of the way different disciplines influence each other. In this regard, and in the context of examining acculturation in general, I think people will be interested in looking at the Swann website. Once there, you’ll find the options of searching different catalogs or searching the site itself. To date I’ve only searched on “Woolf” (without the quotes) and a few other twentieth-century artists. But the site is obviously very full and I think the results are pretty interesting in a variety of ways.

The Swann website: / https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=2511+++++145+&refno=++758511&saletype=

/

Gretchen Gerzina posted the address of the Swann Galleries website on the Listserv of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her own website is at / https://www.gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html

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Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks

It will no doubt be recalled that this year marks another e-first (if I may so….) in that Google Doodles honored Virginia Woolf’s achievements on the occasion of her 136^th birthday. So in the context of new publishing technologies that achievement gets bigger.

And this new event is now followed by free online access to Brenda Silver’s great contribution to Woolf scholarship, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton UP, 1983). As Paula Maggio notes on Blogging Woolf, this new availability is “in multiple digital formats.”

Well worth a look for interested readers……. The link:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/publishing/books/silver-virginia-1983/

Woolf Exhibition

            Woolf Exhibition again… Again because I already noted in September that “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London concludes on October 28, 2014.

If you can see it, I’d highly recommend it (as I did in September). Frances Spalding’s exhibition catalogue is well worth getting your hands on as well (not to mention your eyes). Everything about the show receives high marks. Remember also that the National Portrait Gallery website includes a recording of Frances Spalding talking through parts of the display.

            “Painting and writing have much to tell each other.” Worth repeating a number of times, I think. Happy viewing!

Virginia Woolf exhibition, London

Woolf Exhibition

            And then there is “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision,” the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Frances Spalding. The exhibition catalogue had already been gifted us by a friend, but because of the dates for our London trip, we wouldn’t receive it till we returned home. So the show’s careful planning, the choices made for it, were discovered firsthand, except for some comments by previous viewers which we discovered beforehand, online and off.

            The conscientious organization of the material is welcome given the very full life it attempts to put on display. Then—more than life it is a question of lives, a question of visions plural. For Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell (both nées Stephen) were the prime movers of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, so that any reference to them quickly generates views of their extensive circles. Born in 1882, Woolf’s is one of those remarkable lives that link the Victorian age with the Modernist. Think postmodernist is also modernist—the Bloomsbury group of artists is also postmodernistic.

            In terms of poetry, in terms of vision, “Painting and writing have much to tell each other,” Virginia Woolf tells painting and writing. It isn’t exactly that such a connection was previously unknown. But I think the realist aspects of her fiction grow out of ideas like this. Art and science have much to tell each other, she might easily have said, given the highly allusive nature of her texts. Her references are like those I wrote about here in regard to Julio Cortázar’s “The lines of the hand” (5 March 2014). For that matter, Cortázar’s fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges translated Woolf’s Orlando into Spanish. The growing Woolfian palimpsest.

“Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision” shows the chronological development of Woolf’s art, her life, her vision, as they first touch those hazy lines between modernism/postmodernism. The National Portrait Gallery website includes a recording of Frances Spalding talking through parts of it—well worth the time, oh yes.