‘The conversation began some minutes before anything was said . . .’: Textual Genesis as Dialogue and Confrontation (Woolf vs Joyce and Co)
Résumé
Writers’ manuscripts, and more specifically their reading notes, are the scene of a process of interaction that can be analysed in terms of conversation. This is particularly apparent in Virginia Woolf’s 1919 notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Woolf’s efforts to come to terms with what she is reading involve a multitude of ‘side participants’, who take part in the exchange. Woolf’s own purpose is constantly shifting in the course of the conversation: she tries to understand the book she is reading and to evaluate it, she strives to absorb its novelty and rejects it as a threatening rival, she is forced to question the norms according to which such an evaluation can be made, she begins to draft an essay about modern novels and she indirectly defines what a ‘woolfian novel’, an as yet non-existent genre, could be.
Texte intégral
- 1 The notes are part of a notebook, now at the Berg Foundation, classified as notebook XXXI in Brenda (...)
1My title quotes the first words of Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Together and Apart’, but those words precisely state that the real beginning of conversational interaction lies somewhere upstream of the first audible words. I would like to suggest similarly that the dialogic qualities that we recognize in printed texts are often but the faint traces of an intense conversational process that preceded them. Conversation, in this context, should not be understood as an irenic verbal communion. It is interesting to note that ‘Together and Apart’ was originally called ‘The Conversation’. What prompted the change is open to speculation, but the substitution of one title for the other indicates that for Virginia Woolf they constituted some sort of paradigm. A conversation is indeed something that subsumes togetherness and separation—if we translate this in more dynamic terms, something that implies cooperation and antagonism. This is very much in evidence in Virginia Woolf’s 1918 notes on Joyce’s Ulysses.1 I will try to show that this document can be analysed in terms of conversation, a complex verbal interaction, crucial in the perspective of Woolf’s future development as a novelist.
- 2 In this paper, the use of some of the categories of conversational linguistics is not intended as a (...)
2It may seem strange to speak of conversation regarding these notes. In a purely private manuscript such as the reading notebook in which they are inscribed, there is only one ‘speaker,’ the writer, and no other participant appears to be involved since no one else is normally going to read it. And even if we can detect the presence of other speaking agencies (for instance in quoted passages), their role seems to be totally subordinate. This looks like a very one-sided conversation, hardly worth the name. We would expect that a good deal of the essential components studied by conversation analysis2 should be missing: in particular everything that relates to feed-back, monitoring of conversation by the recipient, or what the analysts call ‘reinforcement’, ‘uptakers’, ‘continuers . . .’ It seems obvious that such a unilateral conversation will not obey most of Grice’s Conversational Maxims—one could even say that most of these maxims in particular the ‘Maxim of manner’, appear irrelevant in such a context: when one is speaking to oneself (or writing for one’s own benefit) it is not necessary to ‘Avoid obscurity of expression’ or to ‘Avoid ambiguity’ or even to ‘Be brief’ or ‘orderly’. We will see that in spite of these restrictions (which may be valid only at some of the levels of this complex document) these notes have many characteristics of a conversation. To understand the nature of this conversation, we must try to analyse the ‘contextual parameters’ of the exchange: the setting, what the linguists call the ‘participative framework’ and finally the purpose.
The Setting
- 3 See also (Silver 155–56).
- 4 The last part of the notebook is devoted to The Life and Letters of William Thomson, Archbishop of (...)
3Let us first describe the external appearance of the manuscript document, which can be considered as the physical setting of this conversation.3 It is an ordinary sized copybook, with a marbled cover bearing the inscription ‘—Modern Novels—’ and a white label with the words ‘Modern Novels (Joyce)’. The contents are divided into two main parts: a series of notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses is followed by a very rough draft of an article on recent fiction based on those notes, with the heading ‘Sketch[es] of an article’.4 This is the first draft of an essay that would eventually be published as ‘Modern Novels’ in the Times Literary Supplement on April 10 1919, and republished in a slightly modified version under the title ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader (1925).
4A simple division in two parts, however, does not do justice to the diversity of the document. The Ulysses notes are preceded by half a page of enigmatic, apparently unconnected notes and before that, on top of the first page, we find a remarkable piece of material bibliography: a listing of the first seven episodes of Ulysses matched with a list of colours. This is not an attempt to grasp Joyce’s colour symbolism but a description of the precise shades of the covers of the successive magazine issues in which the episodes of Ulysses were published. At the other end, after the draft part, the note form resumes briefly with a reference to Pendennis and a few related remarks. More importantly, each of the two main sections are quite heterogeneous. The reading notes include sentences that seem already to be preparing a future essay, and the draft is intermingled with self-addressed questions and exhortations that are clearly not meant for the general public’s eye.
5The spatial disposition visibly reflects the heterogeneity of the document. The above mentioned sections are separated by titles and blanks or dividing lines. The left-hand pages are mostly empty, with a few additions to the main text written on the right-hand pages, and a series of floating notes, with no definite point of insertion in the text. A pencil line is neatly drawn on the left of the right-hand pages, defining a marginal zone that is mainly used for precise references to the text being read. This is a kind of inversion of the common marginalia system: instead of commentaries being inscribed in the margin of the text, the text, called up very concretely in its material incarnation (the page and episode numbers are accompanied by a reminder of the colour of the issue cover), is placed in the margin of the commentary. The general layout is not unlike a musical score: it arranges diagrammatically on the page various registers of expression, various voices whose interventions can be simultaneous as well as successive.
- 5 D.W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-An (...)
6The French word for musical score, partition, might seem even more appropriate in so far as it suggests spatial division and even an active process of separation. We will see that one of the major stakes of this notebook is indeed a process of self-definition through opposition. But before being used ultimately as an instrument of distanciation, it serves as a transitional space (defined by Winnicot as ‘the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people[, the space where] creativity occur[s]’).5 It acts very concretely as an interface between the text of the other and the writing in progress. The thin pencil line drawn by Virginia Woolf in order to create a marginal zone is less an instrument of segregation than a kind of permeable membrane through which the nutritive substance of the ‘other text’ filters into Woolf’s writing, where it is assimilated or rejected—or submitted to a metabolic process that combines assimilation and rejection.
7The notebook also acts as a transitional space between the public and the private spheres. In so far as the notes are for the private consumption of their author, it is essential that they should be inscribed in a place of confidentiality (like a diary copybook, often sold with lock and key to make sure that the indispensable privacy will not be intruded upon), a zone of freedom, a place of trial and error, where things can be said naturally and even bluntly: not only some of the hostility and class prejudice apparent in these notes could hardly have been vented in public, but, more importantly the uncertainty, the indispensable openness that is so much part of the reading of a new book is not possible when a coherent discourse has to be produced publicly. The discussion is full of questions and cautious hypotheses, Virginia Woolf even explicitly and heavily insists on that uncertainty, on the tentativeness of what is written: ‘And here we must make our position clear as bewildered, befogged’, ‘all the remarks here recorded are vague, discursive, & by no means aim at finality’. In the published version, a trace of that uncertainty remains: ‘Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses, now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr Joyce’s intention. On our part it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the exact intention . . .’ It is, however, counterbalanced by a considerably more affirmative voice: ‘whatever the exact intention there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably distinct’. (my emphasis)
8But the notebook, as well as being a private space of receptivity and openness, is also the preparation for a public text and in this respect it is already a place of affirmation and judgment, where Grice’s conversational maxims, but also more subtle rules of social acceptability, are taken into consideration even if they are not immediately implemented. Not only will things have to be said in an intelligible way, but it will not be possible to say them bluntly, and what conversation analysts call ‘softeners, mitigators, disarmers, cajolers, compromisers, sweeteners . . .’ will have to be used. At the same time as she is trying to understand, Virginia Woolf is framing sentences, phrasing pronouncements, looking for ways of expressing her ideas but also of giving social acceptability to feelings that are not entirely rational.
- 6 Such a strategy is obviously inappropriate with Joyce, Woolf herself soon realized it and went in t (...)
9To put it differently, within the private space of the notebook is felt the virtual presence of another setting, the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, where the final version is to appear. This presence is felt strongly in the very first words, an incomplete sentence, written directly under the title ‘Ulysses James Joyce’: ‘The undoubted occasional beauty of his phrases’. This is a clear case of damning with faint praise.6 The first thing that Virginia Woolf feels the need to record is not the fact that some sentences are beautiful, but a formulation that is as restrictive as possible, as if to clear the way for severe criticism. She is not recording a fact, or an impression for her own later use, but availing herself of a phrase that will render socially acceptable the attack that she is ready to level. From the very start, virtual readers/listeners, ready to overhear what can no longer be called a soliloquy, invade the privacy of the manuscript.
- 7 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Wool (...)
- 8 ‘Reviewing’ (The Crowded Dance of Modern Life 160).
- 9 As noted by Rachel Bowlby in her edition of this essay (The Crowded Dance of Modern Life 183).
10A few words about the time setting. The situation is not simple either. One of the defining characteristics of a conversation is that the temporal coordinates are common to the protagonists: they are speaking and listening within the same framework of reference. In this respect, conversation is similar to book reviews and different, for instance, from diary writing. A diary is supposed to be read sometime (a few hours or many years) after it was written: Woolf’s diary is often explicitly addressed to an ‘old Virginia’,7 that will be over fifty when she is reading what the thirty years old Virginia is writing. On the other hand, the book review (as opposed to the critical essay) is addressed to one’s contemporaries, the potential readers of recently published books, but also the writers who have just written them and are eagerly expecting some feed-back. For this reason, Virginia Woolf, towards the end of her life, playfully suggested that reviews could be usefully replaced by a kind of consultation, a private conversation between the author and the reviewer.8 Now, the article Woolf has in mind when she starts taking these notes is halfway between a review and an essay: it deals with recently published books (or even, in the case of Ulysses, a book in the process of being written) but tries to put them in the perspective of the history of the novel and to draw universal conclusions. Woolf’s strategy of revision, when she republishes the essay a few years later in The Common Reader, is ambiguous. Superficially, she seems to be wanting to keep the piece up-to-date, replacing, in the liminal analogy (‘And yet the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making bicycles scarcely holds good beyond the first glance’) the manufacture of bicycles by the more modern manufacturing of motor cars.9 But, strangely enough, she does not actualise a much more crucial matter, her reading of Ulysses: some of her remarks, which could be considered acceptable in 1919, in the shock of discovery of an incomplete text in progress, were much less so in 1925, once the whole book had been published for three years and more perceptive judgements had been expressed in several reviews. Woolf chose not to update the article at all in this respect: it remains a partial view in all senses of the terms. Even if she had her reasons for not coming to terms with the book as a whole, she might have tried to conceal this fact by remaining conveniently vague, but she deliberately retained a sentence like this one: ‘any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses, now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr Joyce’s intention’, in which the tense system openly refers to 1919 and is hopelessly out of date by 1925. This may indicate that Virginia Woolf was less interested in timeless truths than in preserving a moment of conversational exchange. After all one of the first things that crosses her mind as she begins reading Ulysses is that it would be interesting to write something about the very experience of being confronted with contemporaneity and/or innovation (‘Possibly one might write about the effect of reading something new—its queerness’), the process of accommodation that is necessary to make out what does not enter into pre-existing categories.
11On the other hand, the debate seems to transcend the moment, the reference framework seems to be larger. This is evident in the notes even more than in the published essay. ‘Would my objections apply to T[ristram] S[handy]? /Don Juan. I believe Johnson was outraged by TS / T.S. has a warmer temperature than Ulysses’. Beside innovative creative writers (Byron and Sterne), great critical voices of the past (Dr Johnson) are summoned to take part in the debate. In this respect, the setting of the conversation is no longer the present of 1919, no longer the literary market place of Woolf’s time, where she is potentially competing for a share of the public’s attention, but English literature, English literary history, where she is indirectly and preventively staking her claim.
The Participative Framework
12The most interesting thing about interactional or conversational linguistics, is that it replaces the traditional binary relation between speaker and addressee with the notion of ‘participative framework’ that includes ‘side participants’ with various degrees of involvement. Such an approach helps us to understand what is happening in this notebook.
13We have said that the notes were in some respects similar to a musical score. The essential component of this ‘score’ is obviously the duet of voices between Joyce and Woolf, the open ‘intertextual’ relation between these notes and Ulysses, but there are much more than two voices involved and it is not quite accurate to speak of intertextuality because on Woolf’s side there is no text but a vague project and some fragmentary notes. One could speak of an interaction between a manuscript and a book, but it should be remembered that Ulysses as a whole was not published (or even written) in 1919, and that Woolf was confronted only with the first seven instalments, as published in the Little Review (that is to say in a form that was far from final), so we would have to describe it as a conversation between printed fragments and manuscript fragments, or perhaps more interestingly as a conversation between a number of reading and writing agencies.
- 10 In the published essay, where Bennett and Wells are joined by Galsworthy, this status still appears (...)
14It could be said that writing is always done with an eye on several texts (if not on the whole of literature). Conversely, at least for Virginia Woolf, serious reading could only be envisaged with a pen in hand. In her diary, she expresses her gratitude to the reviews she had to write for the TLS: because of them, she was ‘made to read with a pen and notebook, seriously’ (A Writer’s Diary 293). The notes in question were precisely taken in preparation for one of those reviews, not the review of a particular book, but a general overview of contemporary fiction in its relation to the tradition of the novel. The task Virginia Woolf had set for herself was very comprehensive indeed: ‘But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens and Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; and finally Hardy’ (A Writer’s Diary, 5 March 1919, 8). It is interesting to match up this project to her actual readings as far at they are reflected in these notes and in the resulting essay. Of the writers mentioned here, only Joyce and Hardy are present, but in the case of Hardy, Woolf relies on her previous knowledge and does not engage in any new reading of his work. As she expresses it in the notes, he has become a fixed quantity, not something to be read, but a point of reference, a sort of yardstick applicable to other readings: ‘Hardy is planted beyond reach of change; only seems desirable when we read novels not by Hardy’. The entire works of Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot have been replaced by a few pages of Thackeray. But we see the traces of an intense reading effort relating to the first seven episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses. The input from this work has been so massive, so difficult to assimilate that it absorbed Woolf’s reading energies and inflected her writing project. Unpremeditated references appear, generated by the necessity to deal with Joyce: Sterne (with Johnson in his wake, as we have seen) and Byron on the one hand, as examples of eccentricity among the Classics, Wells and Bennett on the other, as foils (‘It is from them we wish to start. We see how much fails to get into their books’)10 and then Chekhov, through a single allusive word (‘Gusev’). In the finished essay, some of these authors disappear, the others are manipulated like pieces in a game of chess for a particular strategic purpose, but in the notebook, particularly in the notes properly speaking, they play their part in a relatively open conversation.
15In 1930, Woolf wrote to Hugh Walpole about his recent novel Rogue Herries:
- 11 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV: 1929–31, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Tra (...)
Even if you dont give me your book, I shall read it. But not until I have written my own. My mind hardens itself and regrets all others. I cant write and read at the same time. Hence my deplorable ignorance of modern fiction. I’ve read scarcely any Lawrence; no Mr Ford Madox Ford, and so on. But I shall read Rogue Herries once my horrible little penance is over for I must say writing books becomes more and more like entering a nunnery. I cant dine out; I cant go to the play. But all the same I shall read Rogue Herries I repeat. Of course I can read any amount of the dead and biographies and poems. But if I read Rogue Herries I shall write Rogue Herries; and I shall then puzzle Mr Arnold Bennett.11
- 12 In print, but also orally, see how conscious of the presence of the public Arnold Bennett also is, (...)
16Making allowances for the simple need to excuse oneself to an eager and susceptible friend and for Woolf’s vein of playful exaggeration, this letter shows two things. First, that Virginia Woolf is writing her own books self-consciously under the eyes of the critics—and notably of Arnold Bennett, with whom the conversation started privately in our notebook and continued12 publicly (if, for a time anonymously) in ‘Modern Novels’, then in a series of letters written by Woolf to the New Statesman about Bennett’s Our Women, went on with Bennett’s review of Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf’s scathing repartee in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, etc. But, more importantly, it shows how much, for Woolf, reading (and especially reading her contemporaries), as well as a source of enrichment, appears as a cause of anxiety, an almost paralysing anxiety of influence. Joyce and the other contemporary novelists are not passive objects of Woolf’s note-taking, they are active voices in the conversation (active forces exerting a deadly fascination that must be resisted at all cost).
- 13 See (A Writer’s Diary 41).
17But this conversation is not only an exchange between writers, it has its institutional side. We have treated the TLS as a setting but it can also be considered as a participant. Virginia Woolf unashamedly describes it as Her Master’s Voice: ‘How pleased I used to be when L. called me ‘You’re wanted by the Major Journal!’ and I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House!’ (A Writer’s Diary 293). This was indeed a call to be answered as a worthy, if slightly rebellious,13 daughter of her father. But another journal, The Little Review, plays an even more important part in this exchange. One could say that Woolf takes up the position of a mediator in a submerged dialogue between the avant-garde feminist journal and the stronghold of the Establishment.
18The Little Review is of course primarily the medium for Joyce’s text. But it is more than a mere vehicle. It was and claimed to be a forum, a place of exchange between writers. On its contents page can be read this proud motto: The Little Review: The magazine that is read by those who write the others. By reading it and reacting to its content Woolf was engaged in a conversation between modernist creators. We even realise that one of her main objections to Joyce (‘Always a mark of the second rate, indifference to public opinion’) is actually a pointed retort to the other motto of the review, to be found on all the covers that Woolf had been carefully describing before she began to read: The Little Review: A magazine of the arts making no compromise with the public taste. Woolf’s reaction to Joyce is also conditioned by The Little Review in subtler and deeper ways. We have mentioned the apparently enigmatic set of notes that occupy the top of the first page of the notebook, above the Ulysses notes. Here they are:
- 14 See May Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson,’ The Little Review, IV.12, April 1918.
19The key of the enigma is simply in the margin. The words that we find there (‘Miss Sinclair,’ ‘Little Review’ and ‘9’) are tags referring to the issue of the Little Review (dated April 1918) in which the second episode of Ulysses was published. Its first article is indeed an article by May Sinclair (‘Miss Sinclair’) on ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’ (‘Miss R’) and we find out that all these notes are almost verbatim quotations from Sinclair’s article.14
Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving knife. The novelist who would be close to reality must confine himself to his knowledge at first hand. He must, as Mr Beresford says, simply ‘plunge in’. Mr Beresford also says that Miss Richardson is the first novelist who has plunged in. (4)
What we used to call the ‘objective’ is a method of after-thought, of spectacular reflection. [. . .] The first hand, intimate and intense reality of the happening is in Myriam’s mind, and by presenting it thus and not otherwise Miss Richardson seizes reality alive. (9)
There are two essays of Rémy de Gourmont in Promenades Littéraires, one on ‘L’Originalité de Maeterlinck,’ one on ‘La leçon de Saint Antoine.’ Certain passages might have been written concerning the art of Dorothy Richardson:
[. . .] ‘Il y a peut-être un sentiment nouveau à créer, celui de l’amour de la vie pour la vie elle-même, abstraction faite des grandes joies qu’elle ne donne pas à tous, et qu’elle ne donne peut-être à personne. . .’ (11)
20On page 4, for instance, we discover that ‘plunge in’ that we tend to read as a direct anticipation of the famous beginning of Mrs Dalloway, is a second degree quotation from Mr Beresford, the writer of the preface to Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs. Moreover, if we read on, we see that another dialogue is engaged between Sinclair and Beresford:
When first I read Pointed Roofs and Backwater and Honeycomb I too thought, like Mr Beresford, that Miss Richardson has been the first to plunge. But it seems to me rather that she has followed, independently, perhaps unconscioulsy, a growing tendency to plunge. As far back as the eighties the de Goncourts plunged completely, finally, in Sœur Philomène, Germinie Lacerteux and Les Frères Zemganno. Marguerite Audoux plunged in the best passages of Marie Claire. The best of every good novelist’s best work is a more or less sustained immersion.
21Other writers (Goncourt, Audoux) are summoned here. They will not appear nominally in Woolf’s notes or in her published article, but who could say that they are not side participants in the conversation? And what about Maeterlinck and Saint Antoine who are made to speak through Rémy de Gourmont on page 11?
- 15 She could hardly have failed to notice it, since it was the opening article and the ‘cover story’ o (...)
- 16 Woolf does not use the word, but it is in Sinclair’s article that it was first used in a literary c (...)
22The presence of ‘Miss Sinclair’, at least, is minimally acknowledged in the opening notes. But her (indirect) presence is even stronger in the following Ulysses notes. It seems that what happened was that Woolf, as she was gathering the Little Review issues and preparing the colour-table of their covers prior to reading them, let herself be diverted by Sinclair’s article,15 thinking that it would be useful for her own piece on modern novels. The ideas that she read in this article are very present in the ‘Modern Novels’ essay, but, before that, they distinctly affected the reading of Ulysses. Woolf read Joyce through Dorothy Richardson, or rather, to be more accurate, through May Sinclair’s view of Richardson (not to mention Sinclair’s view of Beresford’s view of Richardson, or Gourmont’s view of Maeterlinck, redirected towards Richardson by Sinclair). Hence Woolf’s very psychological reading of Ulysses, her insistence on the idea of stream-of-consciousness.16
- 17 Reading Jacob’s Room four years later, the anonymous reviewer of the New York Times still presented (...)
- 18 Virginia Woolf resented Katherine Mansfield’s statement that she was ‘Jane Austen all over again’ ((...)
- 19 This could be interpreted in different ways: it may reflect Woolf’s perception, at this time, of ot (...)
23But in spite of her demonstrable importance in the genesis of ‘Modern Novels/Modern Fiction’—and perhaps of Woolf’s future novels—, May Sinclair is not mentioned at all in the article. We might guess that Woolf was not eager to acknowledge this debt and to associate herself with a writer that was much more important than we might imagine today.17 It is perhaps also significant that Jane Austen18 is the only woman novelist mentioned in the published article. The single contemporary fiction writer mentioned in the notes, Gertrude Stein (‘The desire to be more psychological—get more things into fiction. Everything can go in Gertrude Stein’), is conspicuously absent from the final version.19
The Purpose of the Exchange
24Exploring the setting and participative framework of this exchange has already given us more than a glimpse of its (multiple and often contradictory) purpose. At the beginning Woolf sets out to read and evaluate a large number of novels, but the reading notes turn out to be devoted to one single overwhelming book. Then the notes are abandoned in favour of the draft of an essay. In the course of the reading and drafting the question of norms is persistent, but it is tackled with different intentions: coming to terms with Joyce, a reflexive assessment of the norms used to assess any novelist, a reflection on modernity, on what it is to write (and read) a modern novel and, indirectly, a working-through of the definition of what a ‘woolfian novel’, this as yet non-existent genre, would be.
- 20 She endeavours, more or less successfully, to understand what is going on in Ulysses: ‘Bloom—/edito (...)
- 21 See (Ferrer 181–86).
- 22 See the already quoted diary entry of 5 March 1919.
25Woolf the reader never forgets that she is also Woolf the critic, who will have to pass a judgment on what she is reading in her intended article, and she is also aware that she is Woolf the writer, striving to define a norm that will guide her own future writing. Already, in her notes from May Sinclair, she emphasized evaluative (‘life is richer’) and prescriptive (‘the novelist must’) statements. In the remainder of the notebook, at the same time as she tries to understand Joyce,20 she undertakes to judge him. But how is it possible to judge something that obviously supersedes existing norms? The accepted norms must be re-examined and adjusted to accommodate the new work, but how can one do that without surrendering to this work and erecting it as a more valid norm (something Woolf is absolutely not ready to do)? How can one assess the norms and the new work at the same time?21 The answer was already part of the original purpose: this can only be achieved through a process of comparison.22 So Woolf deliberately compares Joyce with the traditional novelists and the marginal Classics (Sterne and Byron), with the pre-moderns (Hardy, James and Conrad) and with the Edwardians (Bennett and Wells), then, on the basis of what she feels to be satisfactory and unsatisfactory in each, she tries to establish a new set of norms. She even goes as far as suggesting that no literary value is eternal, and that norm-making is always conversational: it is because the Edwardians have been so materialistic that the modern novel must be more spiritual. Revolution (‘For all I know, every great book has been an act of revolution’), in the sense of radical change in reaction to the present state of literature (‘we must go on; can’t stand still; move on from our immediate past’), is a perpetual necessity. The theory adumbrated here (‘the big things [. . .] must be seen again, felt again; always. perpetually’) is very similar to the theory of ostranienie that was being developed by Chlovski at about the same time.
- 23 ‘Their minds lack quality—& as you get nothing but their minds! [. . .] But the worst of Joyce a[nd (...)
26This (the objective appraisal of Ulysses, the dialogic establishment of a new set of values and the reflection on the process of evaluation) is not however the whole story. It is clear that Woolf is resisting very strongly what she is reading, or even that she is determined, before she starts, to find fault with what she is reading. The norms are used as a weapon in a struggle to get the upper hand, to shift from the subjugated condition of reader, overwhelmed by the new masterpiece, to the superior stance of the discriminating critic. Whereas, in the finished essay, Joyce appears on the whole as an ally, in the notebook he is clearly felt to be an enemy. And if the aesthetic norms are too shaky to serve as an effective weapon, evaluation must be transferred to other levels: Joyce dwells too much on indecency, he is not generous enough, the temperature of his book is too low, the quality of his mind is not good enough . . .23
27This is part of a conscious or unconscious strategy of relative positioning. Analysts have noticed that in most conversations a great deal of time and energy is spent defining and confirming the respective status of the participants or struggling for the dominant position. Woolf obviously feels that Joyce must be put in his place, sent back where he belongs: ‘in a back street’ with his ‘set’. But putting the other in his/her place is often an attempt to secure one’s own place. The preoccupation of Woolf is not to establish a pecking order between authors, she is performing a kind of tug of war to gain territory, to clear a breathing space, a room of her own, so to speak, in which to exist and create. She feels threatened by Joyce’s towering stature and she feels she must belittle him.
28She is perfectly aware of the partiality of her attitude (‘Perhaps its unfair to consider the method so much [. . .] The quite unjust sense that he’s doing it on purpose to show off [. . .] it may be true that the subconscious mind dwells on indecency’), but she will try to conceal this in the published essay rather than modify it: it is a question of survival. We could chose to ignore this less than generous attitude, but it has a very important consequence. It is in the process of rejecting Joyce that she initiates a process of self-definition: the main weakness that she identifies, or thinks that she has identified, in Ulysses will suggest, in a form of negative intertextuality, a direction for the development of her own style, a development that will find its expression, in different stages, in her future novel.
29It begins as a series of converging remarks:
But he worst of Joyce ac: is their egotism
[. . .]
perhaps this method gets less into other people
& too much into one.
[. . .]
Funeral perhaps the best thing.
but isn’t it always the same mind?
[. . .]
Then the summing up.
The necessity of magnanimity &
generosity. Trying to see as much of other
people as possible, & not oneself
30In the final text of the essay, these analytic fragments are replaced by an impressionistic image:
it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?
31Woolf’s own next novel will start in the opposite direction: instead of being shut up in the claustrophobic room of a particular mind, Jacob’s Room will explore the space of a room, which is a locus of interaction between the mind and its environment, and in the following novel, Mrs Dalloway (a book that is in other respects pervaded with the influence of Ulysses), she will develop her own characteristic technique, based on free indirect speech and the fluidity of borders between centres of subjectivity. Whether or not the faults that Woolf believed she had found in Joyce’s book were real or imaginary, the result of a superficial or biased reading, they allowed her to define, as it were conversationally, her own territory and her own voice.
- 24 John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 159.
32It is time to examine if anything has been gained by analysing this document in terms of conversation. Is it more than a mere analogy? At the very least it has enabled us to account for a number of apparently unconnected features. The famous sociolinguist John Gumperz has described conversation as ‘a dynamic interactive flow marked by constant transitions from one mode of speaking to another’.24 This seems like an excellent account of what is going on in this notebook. We have seen that it is indeed an exchange, and not a one-sided speech. Woolf is influenced by what she reads. Can we consider that this is the mutual interaction which is the basis of conversation? Of course, the texts being read are not modified, but their reading is modified: what is read and how it is read. Reading ‘with a pen and notebook, seriously’, Woolf responds to the input of her reading with a production of writing. Far from being passive, she reacts to Ulysses or more accurately to The Little Review, choosing in it what she will read and in what order (May Sinclair before Joyce) and this choice in turn influences the way she reads. But couldn’t we have explained this interaction in terms of dialogue and dialogism? Probably, but the notion of Bakhtinian dialogism, as it is commonly understood, is perhaps less dynamic: the ‘dialogic word’ is certainly dynamic in so far as it is inflected by the word of the other, but the word of the other is considered as static, as a stable pole of positive or negative attraction. What we have seen in the case we have been studying is a discourse of the other which is itself a shifting quantity, not only because, exceptionally and emblematically, it is still a work-in-progress, being published in instalments and in a provisional form, but also because it is not taken as a whole: we see it being read page by page, discovered episode by episode, eliciting a changing reaction as the reading proceeds. Perhaps we should reserve the notion of dialogism for completed (fixed) texts and use a conversational approach to deal with avant-textes of this kind?
33In another essay, Virginia Woolf herself extends the idea considerably, when she suggests that literary evolution takes the form of a conversation of notebooks across history:
it seems that it would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and scrawls and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. (‘How it Strikes a Contemporary,’ The Crowded Dance of Modern Life 30–31)
Notes
1 The notes are part of a notebook, now at the Berg Foundation, classified as notebook XXXI in Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). They have been published by Suzette Henke in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). Virginia Woolf’s writing, in her reading notes, is extremely difficult to decipher. The following emendations should be applied to Henke’s excellent transcription: page 642 of Henke’s transcription: for ‘plunge in!’ read ‘plunge in’; for ‘The ordinary life reaches then the extraordinary’ read ‘The ordinary life richer than the extraordinary’; for ‘Minor [. . .] minds lack quality—and as you get nothing but minor minds!’ read ‘Their minds lack quality—and as you get nothing but their minds!’. Page 643 for ‘The inner thought’ read ‘In inner thought’; for ‘The—thrush—throstle—’ read ‘tre—thrust—throstle—’ (Woolf notes an alliteration in a Joycean paragraph); for ‘how a hare does jump’ read ‘how a horse does jump’. Page 644 for ‘mainly an excuse for writing’ ‘merely an excuse for writing’; for ‘(which makes us [?urgent])’ perhaps read ‘(which makes us regress)’; for ‘of any like art’ read ‘of any live art’; for ‘provincial and temporary’ read ‘provisional and temporary’; for ‘new versions of beauty’ read ‘new visions of beauty’; for ‘We see stories where people did not see them in the past . . .’ read ‘We see stories where people did not see them in the past. Gusev’ (Chekhov’s paradigmatic short story). Page 645 for ‘It’s possible that the novel to us is what the drama was to the Greeks’ read ‘It’s possible that the novel to us is what the drama was to the E[lisabethans]’; for ‘by no means are of finality’ read ‘by no means aim at finality’; for ‘Yet it seems just possible’ read ‘Yet it seems quite possible’. Moreover, in accordance with the general format of the collection, the notes were published not in a diplomatic transcription but in a format as close to a finished text as possible. This is partly misleading and does not do justice to their aspect. The interested reader should consult the CD-Rom Major Authors: Virginia Woolf, ed. Mark Hussey (Reading: Primary Source Media, 1997) which provides a digital image of the manuscript (unfortunately in a very low definition). For a study of those notes from a different angle, see also Ferrer, ‘Les bibliothèques virtuelles de James Joyce et de Virginia Woolf’, Bibliothèques d’écrivains, eds. Paolo D’Iorio and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2001).
2 In this paper, the use of some of the categories of conversational linguistics is not intended as a rigorous one. To say the truth, the discipline as a whole is not a very rigorous one. Its contours are rather fuzzy, ranging from linguistics and psychology to analytic philosophy and cybernetics. It is nevertheless a very stimulating field of research and the study of literature (I mean in particular the genetic study of literature, but the remark has a wider application) would do well to make a wider use of some of the insights developed in this field. An excellent synthesis is to be found in Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s Les Interactions verbales vol.1 and 2 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990 and 1992).
3 See also (Silver 155–56).
4 The last part of the notebook is devoted to The Life and Letters of William Thomson, Archbishop of York . . ., but the presence of those notes in this particular copybook seems to be fortuitous: apparently the remaining blank pages were used a few weeks later, so we can consider that it doesn’t affect the particular conversation we are interested in.
5 D.W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1951, London: Hogarth, 1982) 224.
6 Such a strategy is obviously inappropriate with Joyce, Woolf herself soon realized it and went in the opposite direction a few years later in ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923): ‘Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster’, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin, 1993) 27.
7 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953) 21,24.
8 ‘Reviewing’ (The Crowded Dance of Modern Life 160).
9 As noted by Rachel Bowlby in her edition of this essay (The Crowded Dance of Modern Life 183).
10 In the published essay, where Bennett and Wells are joined by Galsworthy, this status still appears very clearly: ‘Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done.’
11 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV: 1929–31, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) 153.
12 In print, but also orally, see how conscious of the presence of the public Arnold Bennett also is, when they meet in 1930: ‘Last night I was at Ethel Sands’ and had a great pow-wow with Virginia Woolf. (Other guests had held their breath to listen to us.)’ Arnold Bennett, Arnold Bennett’s Letters to his Nephew, ed. Richard Bennett (New York: Harper and Bros, 1935) 92.
13 See (A Writer’s Diary 41).
14 See May Sinclair, ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson,’ The Little Review, IV.12, April 1918.
15 She could hardly have failed to notice it, since it was the opening article and the ‘cover story’ of the issue, occupying the same place as ‘“Ulysses” by James Joyce’ in the previous issue.
16 Woolf does not use the word, but it is in Sinclair’s article that it was first used in a literary context. It soon became current and the reviewers of Woolf’s subsequent novel use it liberally.
17 Reading Jacob’s Room four years later, the anonymous reviewer of the New York Times still presented things in this way: ‘It is to be suspected that Miss Woolf stems from May Sinclair, but she has carried the terse method of that excellent writer to a natural conclusion and added to its value by a vein of sheer poetry that continually crops out [. . .] This book again impresses upon the reader of English fiction the great quality of the women now writing in that country. Headed, of course, by May Sinclair, there is a host of names—Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Butts, Ethel Colburne Mayne, F. Tennyson Jesse, Elinor Mordaunt. Indeed, the list is endless. Miss Woolf is certainly one of the foremost figures in this group, and one is glad to note that she is, for her work is more cynical, more compact with beauty than several of the others. Her influence is one that modern England needs’. Anonymous, ‘Latest Works of Fiction’ [Review of Jacob’s Room], The New York Time, March 4, 1923.
18 Virginia Woolf resented Katherine Mansfield’s statement that she was ‘Jane Austen all over again’ (A Writer’s Diary 22).
19 This could be interpreted in different ways: it may reflect Woolf’s perception, at this time, of other women writers (like Katherine Mansfield) as particularly threatening rivals, or her fear to be lumped away with them in the reassuring category of female novelists by reviewers, all too ready to do so: see note 16 above, see also for instance The New York Times 1925 review of The Common Reader: ‘It is too bad that Mrs Woolf did not go more thoroughly into her conceptions of the modern novel, for she undoubtedly has much to say that is pertinent to the occasion. Her femininity is never in doubt and we have yet to hear a modernist in fiction, a woman, express herself explicitly in regard to this great and unending argument’. Anonymous, ‘Virginia Woolf in Praise of the Common Reader—He is Neither Scholar Nor Critic, But She Is Both,’ The New York Time, May 31, 1925
20 She endeavours, more or less successfully, to understand what is going on in Ulysses: ‘Bloom—/editor of a paper. /Dignam dies/Stephen Dedalus is the/son of Mr Dedalus. /Mulligan is his friend—/What is the connection/between Bloom and Dedalus?’
21 See (Ferrer 181–86).
22 See the already quoted diary entry of 5 March 1919.
23 ‘Their minds lack quality—& as you get nothing but their minds! [. . .] But the worst of Joyce a[nd]c[ompany]: is their egotism—no generosity or comprehensiveness. Also seems to be written for a set in a back street. What does this come from? Always a mark of the second rate. Indifference to public opinion—desire to shock—need of dwelling so much on indecency. [. . .] Would my objections apply to T[ristram] S[handy]? [. . .] T.S. has a warmer temperature than Ulysses’.
24 John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 159.
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Daniel Ferrer, « ‘The conversation began some minutes before anything was said . . .’: Textual Genesis as Dialogue and Confrontation (Woolf vs Joyce and Co) », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 10 juillet 2024, consulté le 08 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15036 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwl
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