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Virginia Woolf’s Politics of Reviewing: a Place for Conversation

Denise Ginfray

Résumé

This paper examines how Woolf’s artistic project that lies at the intersection of her various commitments as a novelist, an essayist and a reviewer, questions the aesthetic and ethic principles inherited from the Western literary tradition. It posits that her many reviews where novelists, poets, styles, genres, fiction, non-fiction, social, sexual and cultural parameters intertwine and converse with one another, have paved the way for her own modes of writing and reading, and for the emergence of the modernist novel.

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  • 1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reviewing’ (1939) The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Pen (...)
  • 2 Virginia Woolf, ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ (1924) The Comm (...)

1In ‘Reviewing’,1 first published in the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlet series on 2 November 1939, Virginia Woolf develops her reflection on the dialectics between ‘writing as a job and writing as art’ central to ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923) and to ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ (1925)2 where she compares pieces of writing to those crocuses that grow in Kensington Gardens and argues that ‘writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has been shared’ (206). ‘Reviewing’, written a couple of years before her death, reads like an assessment of her multi-faceted career. Yet, it is no handbook for successful practise; it simply traces her deep insight into the discussion which binds author, reader and reviewer in an age adrift that probes dogmatic positions of all sorts. In her essay based on a short history of literary criticism, she claims that the Modern age with its new socio-economic constraints is responsible for the too-often prejudiced exchange that has brought the author and the reviewer into conflict and ‘lessened the value of the review to the reader’. In the opening lines where she features the positions of poets, playwrights and novelists ‘doing their work under the curious eyes of reviewers’ (152), she equates the shop-window/looking-glass connection with the bond that relates the author on display to the group of performers (the reviewers) and the curious crowd. Woolf argues that it is because criticism has ceased to be ‘conveyed by word of mouth, by the audience in the theatre, by fellow writers in taverns and private workshops’ (153) to become printed criticism, and because the Press is ‘a great multiplier of crocuses’ that influences the reader’s taste and promotes new aesthetic judgements, that special care should be paid to new conditions of reviewing; otherwise, it might well become ‘a Gutter and Stamp production’ (157) hedging merely between praise and blame. Faced with the collusion of journalistic writing, mass-culture, and the fetishistic value of the commodity, Woolf advocates ‘discussion –fearless and disinterested discussion’ between the author and the reviewer. She assumes that ‘the value of the dialogue’ that should bind both the author and the critic for literature’s sake might reconcile the reviewer blamed for ‘inflating reputations and stimulating sales’ (159) with the author who seeks ‘criticism and advice genuinely’ (161). She even proposes one-to-one consultations where ‘They would talk, seriously and privately. [. . .] The consultant could speak honestly and openly. [. . .] Privacy would lessen the shop-window temptation–the temptation to cut a figure, to pay off scores’ (160).

  • 3 See, for example, Alain Milon ‘L’enjeu du style ou la grammaire de la conversation’, L’art de la co (...)

Woolf’s artistic project presents itself like a conversation between 1) literary genres and styles with language as both object and medium; 2) the objective reality of the referential world and the text as a linguistic artefact; 3) the self and others. Not only does Woolf’s regular reviewing (mainly for The Times Literary Supplement) testify to stimulating exchange between theoretical and creative texts, but it marks out the emergence of her own ‘écriture’ and raises major questions about style.3

A Poetics of Literary Conversation

  • 4 See Francis Jacques, ‘Stratégies interactionnelles. Conversation, négociation, dialogue’, Échanges (...)
  • 5 Woolf exposes her own point of view in ‘The Modern Essay’ (1922) A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays: (...)

2Like most types of conversational transactions, be they discussions, dialogues, negotiations,4 reviewing supposes that somebody fixes the rules of the game. Verbal exchange like business exchange is a symbolic form of trade whose key-words are communication, persuasion, agreement, gain and loss, and above all, pleasure. Reviewing is an institution that is part of literary practise, a ritual that transits through socio-economic, ideological, rhetorical parameters, and for Woolf, the critic-novelist who resented editorial pressure so much (‘the intellectual harlotry’ of reviewing with its hierarchies, censorship and eagerness), it was both excitement and agony. Indeed, reviewing or ‘commenting aloud’ on literary works is not a private tête-à-tête but a social activity with its own codes and rhetoric; it is a production that must integrate the constrictions of the market-place in terms of collective time, output, energy and money, and take into account a great many criteria like patronage, audience, sales, reputation, conflicting opinions, quantity and quality.5 I will not examine all the elements that make of literary journalism a joint-venture based, ideally, on mutual respect and cooperation; I will focus on Woolf’s poetics of literary conversation with generations of writers and readers, laying stress on the issue of discourse itself.

  • 6 Gérard Cahen ed., La conversation. Un art de l’instant (Paris: Éditions Autrement, n°182, 1999).

3As a matter of fact, Woolf’s reviews are no random talks at all, but they respect a special type of encoding that privileges the phatic function of language (in Roman Jakobson’s terminology). Each of them constitutes a specific intra-linguistic situation where the message is selective, informative, speculative, constructive and highly reflexive, and whose compliance with imperatives of truth, sincerity, exhaustivity (Grice’s maximes conversationnelles) highly debatable. Woolf’s activity as a reviewer is not exactly an extension of oral conversation—‘un art de l’instant’6—but une conversation en différé that implies a twofold process of de-contextualization and re-contextualization of the literary message in question for the locutors’ respective experiences of spatiality and temporality differ totally. Over and over again in her professional work, she practised this difficult exercice de style framed within a Russian doll pattern of utterances where the dramatization of the writing-process and the elaboration of une histoire des idées overlap and foreground the specificity of literature. She knew perfectly that, at its worst, reviewing is a sterile verbal sparring match or a futile battle of wits; at its best, it is an art in itself whose aim is to inform, convince and seduce through language.

  • 7 Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Essays’, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds. Sue Roe an (...)

4The mood behind Woolf’s reviews fits well the standards of bienséance proper to literary salons with their social convenances. Faced with the threat of reification imposed by printing to modern writing, she conducted them through wit, humour, irony and wished they were accessible, entertaining, convincing for they also addressed non-specialist readers whom she wanted to identify with. If, as the etymology suggests, conversation designates a certain mode of being in the company of somebody, Woolf’s dialogue with literary works is definitely not the result of acrimony and arid judgement, even if, as Hermione Lee notes, ‘some of her readings were skewed by rivalry, frienship or temperament’.7 Instead, it is synonymous with complicity and enjoyment, well aware as she was of the impact of mots d’esprit and other verbal creations.

  • 8 Virginia Woolf, ‘The American Woman’ [1905]; ‘Royalty’ [1934] (Bowlby 1992, 8–10; 154–158).
  • 9 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Imperfect Lady’ [1920]; ‘Men and Women’ [1920]; ‘The Compromise’ [1923]; ‘Monta (...)
  • 10 For example: ‘a Greek gem’ (‘Men and Women’ 18) ; ‘the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating d (...)
  • 11 Virginia Woolf, ‘Freudian Fiction’ [1920] (Bowlby 1992, 21–23, 21).

5Indeed, one can step easily in her reviews for her style stands half way between straightforwardness and high-brow, and her skilful discussion is always reader-oriented. First, she chooses to use the personal pronoun ‘we’ that erases distance between the sender and the sendee(s) of the literary message, she adopts her readers’ idiolects and borrows their lexics, clichés or ready-made sentences (‘The American Woman’, ‘Royalty’),8 or she sometimes investigates the lieux communs of the dominant discourses, be they institutional, academic or political (‘Royalty’). Most of the time though, her style is very inventive. Obliqueness is among her favourite rhetorical devices: she delights in strategies of omission or suggestion, in the use of allusions, of double-entendre, of irony. She sprinkles her serious argumentation with provocative statements, with domestic or natural imagery (‘Men and Women’ 18; ‘An Imperfect Lady’ 25; ‘The Compromise’ 53; ‘Montaigne’ 63);9 with metaphors,10 or with verbal tricks as in ‘Freudian Fiction’, where she puns on J. D. Beresford’s An Imperfect Mother and writes that ‘one cannot help feeling that conscience can at best play a stepmother’s part in the art of fiction’.11 In a similar vein, she adopts a pastiche of eighteenth-century style in her witty review of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel where she assimilates fiction with ‘a lady who has somehow got herself into trouble’, and Forster himself as one who:

  • 12 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Fiction’ [1927] (Bowlby 1992, 121–25, 121).

[. . .] enjoys the privileges which are allowed to the lover. He knocks at the bedroom door and is admitted when the lady is in slippers and dressing gown. Drawing up their chairs to the fire they talk easily, wittingly, subtly, like old friends who have no illusions, although in fact the bedroom is a lecture-room, and the place for the highly austere city of Cambridge. (‘The Art of Fiction’)12

6Perhaps the most attractive feature of Woolf’s reviews lies in the playful combination of the codes of written exchange with some of the qualities of informal talk that creates an emotional atmosphere of its own. Over the years, she became an expert in journalist criticism and learnt how not to linger systematically on technological devices, or how to drop the analytical mood to insert traces of personal material with the result that her accounts sometimes seem to fall into gossip. Her syntax, ‘wandering off into the sidelines’ (Bowlby 1992, xii), is consciously exploratory with short digressions under control, paragraphs that do not always follow a strict logical ordering. She mixes strict, formal hypotaxis with parataxis and re-introduces traces of oral speech within her text in the form of ‘endless notes of interrogation’ (‘The Compromise’ 54), of rhetorical questions left unanswered or partly answered so as to keep her discussion suspended in space and time. She regales her readers with short parables, anecdotes or little stories (‘Montaigne’ 56), with a plethora of minute and evocative details, long lists that swarm through her mind. Above all, she foregrounds the relation of voicing to writing and tries to word the inflexions of the voice, a major marker of conversation that regulates the receptor’s activity and maintains connection. Of course, it would be excessive to assert that Woolf’s critical prose integrates the many variations in height and intensity proper to oral conversation. All the same, the voice that does complexify the message by means of changes in pitch or pauses is present through the alternation of rising and falling sentence patterns and variations in grammatical functions, through the syntax with its parenthetical insertions and repetitions, along with forms of insistence or conspicuous punctuation that signal silence.

7In a way, her journalistic essays constitute the playground for the aesthetic principles exposed in ‘How Should One Read a Book’ (1923) where she maps her theory of reading and sets the parameters of a successful cooperation between author and reader, whom, she thinks, are jointly responsible for the quality and durability of verbal exchange. In Woolf’s mind, the part devoted to the author is that of an entertainer who addresses an anonymous, silent presence required, in its turn, to perform an active role in the transaction. The part devoted to the ‘common reader’ is to set down the writer to his/her task, to remind him/her of his/her ethical duty as a witness to the things of the world. Perhaps, it is also to share with him/her the secrets of a common idiom and listen to the modern artist’s desire which is to promote ‘la jouissance du texte’ as a bulwark for literary art against consumerism.

  • 13 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ [1920] (Bowlby 1992, 30–39).

8On some occasions though, the reviewed/reviewer dialectics takes on more radical accents and the turn-taking system proper to this pattern of shifting utterances and enunciative positions happens to be ineffective. A fine example is her argument with Arnold Bennett whose dimension was both theoretical, meta-theoretical and ideological. In ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ (1920),13 a contribution that followed the publication by Bennett of a collection of his essays, Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord, their literary conversation takes the form of a bitter negotiation. Woolf engaged in the polemics after her own friend Desmond MacCarthy wrote a review of Bennett’s book in The New Statesman, under his pseudonym, Affable Hawk. In what reads like a dialogue of the deaf, Woolf launches into a deconstruction of all the points debated by both the author and the critic. Woolf’s rhetoric there is mainly argumentative: what she wants first is convert her interlocutors rather than converse with them. Her reply to the Editor of The New Statesman about Bennett’s books is full of ironic wit: ‘I taste them, [. . .] in sips at the hands of reviewers. But I cannot swallow the teaspoonful administered in your columns last week by Affable Hawk’ (33). Woolf involves in a harsh diatribe against both male writers who assume that women writers, either good or bad, do not exist and pleads most sarcastically that ‘there was some external restraint upon their powers’ (36), and that ‘the absence of poetesses of moderate merit [. . .] proves that there were no women writers of potential mediocrity’ (36). The criss-cross pattern of Woolf’s and MacCarthy’s replies leads Woolf to immerse in a vindication of the rights of woman to create, reminiscent of Mary Wollstonecraft’s influential treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792. She jumps from Sappho to novelists, playwrights, classical scholars like the Duchess of Newcastle, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Aphra Ben, George Eliot, Jane Harrison. Her address is vehement as she enumerates her arguments about female writing, access to education and economic autonomy. Her conclusion contains the ingredients she developed a few years later in non-fictional works like A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), as she places her discussion in the field of ideology:

Certainly I cannot doubt that if such conditions prevail in the future we shall remain in a condition of half-civilized barbarism. At least that is how I define an eternity of dominion on the one hand and of servility on the other. For the degradation of being a slave is only equalled by the degradation of being a master. (39)

9But the conversation eventually reaches a deadlock and MacCarthy gets the last word: ‘Affable Hawk writes: If the freedom and education of women is impeded by the expression of my views, I shall argue no more’ (39).

Reviewing and the Dialogical Mind

  • 14 See Mikhaïl Bakhtine’s Écrits in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique (Paris: (...)

10Woolf’s reviews form a discursive whole where publisher, author, reader and reviewer meet and argue via the literary work. Curiously enough, even if they sometimes appear like apartés with privileged fellow-writers, they provide a junction between individual and collective discourses, between the singularity of a literary voice and the reassuring continuity of a community of artists. They also testify to a literature in quest of its origins which scrutinizes itself in the mirror of literary texts of all sorts (biographies, memoirs, poetry, letters, fiction and non-fiction, critical essays. . .) to find out an identity of its own. Woolf is no exception to the rule: her critical work brings into touch two (or more) written messages/énoncés that contest each other, and it is precisely the interaction of these different modes that prompts a pragmatics of writing and reading. Woolf’s politics of reviewing is indeed more than a simple dialogue between styles and genres: it is both une mise à l’écoute of her own conception of literature and une mise en texte of the implicit answers she received from her many interlocutors. On many occasions, novel and review writing form a pair of sequences, of ‘speech acts’, in Austin’s terminology, that echo each other—this is dialogism,14 in the Bakhtinian sense of the term, where criticism offers a framework to fiction.

  • 15 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tunnel’ [1919] (Bowlby 1992, 15–17).

11Two among the many reviews Woolf wrote for The Times Literary Supplement highlight the major stylistic gambits that emerge from her criticical practise. When she wrote her review of Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel (1919),15 she had already published The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). As for ‘The Art of Fiction’, a review of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) published while working on To the Lighthouse (1927), it comes as a response to Forster’s ‘Art for art’s sake’, a major feature of the Bloomsbury aesthetics in the 1920s and a favourite topic among the intelligentsia that met and talked there on Thursday Evenings. The novels that followed were Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931).

  • 16 See in particular ‘Women Novelists’, ‘The American Woman’, ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’, ‘Men and (...)

12Both reviews are outstanding milestones that cast light on the novelistic form in progress: there, Woolf tackles the aesthetic and ethical principles which, she thought, had come into being in the Western world ‘around December, 1910’. Not only do they constitute a dialogue with other writers where she broaches such thorny questions as the relationship between gender and literary genres for example,16 but they are the locus par excellence of a constant redefinition of her own style and of the mutual exigencies of artistic forms. If reviewing had any ‘boomerang effect’ on her fiction, it was certainly in terms of narrative strategies, of subjectivity and textuality. For Woolf, whose main challenge was to net the enigmatic nature of the self, the problematic experience of the sensible world in fictional and non-fictional forms, the common denominators of her dialogue with authors, readers, texts and self are the protean nature of language and the duality of Life, fact and vision, ‘granite and rainbow’.

A Review of Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel (1919)

  • 17 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London (...)

13At the core of her essay, Woolf places the surface and depth dialectics that runs throughout the series of 12 novels that Dorothy Richardson wrote between 1915 and 1938 under the general title of Pilgrimage. On reading The Tunnel (1919), Woolf had felt somewhat disappointed because she thought it lacked depth, and was too reluctant to probe ‘those dark places of psychology’ (‘Modern Fiction’)17 so conspicuously neglected by her Edwardian predecessors. In her review that hovers between admiration and moderate criticism, Woolf examines with respect how Richardson’s novel is not located within patriarchal myths and traditions. She willingly admits her efforts to get rid of realism and avoid exhibition of authorial control:

the reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson’s consciousness, to register one after the other, and one on top of another, words, cries, shouts, notes of a violin, fragments of lectures, to follow these impressions as they flicker through Miriam’s’mind, waking incongruously other thoughts, and plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life. (16)

14Likewise, she values the way Richardson discloses the many layers of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness and eludes the more conventional topoï of fictional narrative:

All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, [. . .], the small sensitive lump of matter, half transparent and half opaque, which endlessly reflects and distorts the variegated procession, and is [. . .] the source beneath the surface, the very oyster within the shell. (15)

  • 18 Virginia Woolf, ‘Women Novelists’ [1918] (Bowlby 1992, 11–14).

15She quotes a passage from The Tunnel where Richardson’s technique is suggestive of Miriam’s reverie, she notes how the elusiveness of the modern life together with the inconsistency of the private self behind the social self permeate the logic of fictional discourse. She writes that she deligths in the effects of sense derived from the smooth glissandos from ‘she’ to ‘I’, from the shifts in focalization and narrative voices or from the pauses commanded by dots. However, she regrets a tension or rather an absence of resolution between the desire to disparage older forms and a shy approach to a new form that, all in all, ‘has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms’. For what Woolf had in mind was not merely to write from another site of enunciation or disengage from words of authority and hierarchies. Her main interest lay in the very substance of verbal flow, in its syntax, in its possibility to shape the speaking female subject in textual forms and express the transitoriness, the impalpability of Life. One of Woolf’s dissatisfactions with Richardson’s method is about the relation of form to sexual identity, what she calls ‘the tyranny of sex itself’ (‘Women Novelists’18 12). She feels some reticence about her way of ‘cutting out ‘him and her’’, addressing Richardson’s own dilemma exposed in her Preface to Pilgrimage:

the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking around for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.

  • 19 See Robert Humphrey’s Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of Californ (...)

16Woolf’s major objection to Richardson’s ‘psychological autobiography’ is that it does not intrude deep enough into the ‘reality that underlies these appearances’. She enjoys the way she rids the fictional character of the superfluous vestments of realism, how the narrative voice manages to slip in and out of female consciousness, how the stream-of-consciousness technique mixes with the interior monologue and the soliloquy,19 but she considers that she still remains too near ‘the vivid surface’:

The consciousness of Miriam takes the reflection of a dentist’s room to perfection. Her sense of touch, sight and hearing are all excessively acute. But sensations, impressions, ideas and emotions glance off her, unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depth. (16–17)

17What mattered most for Woolf, was how to investigate the core of the split self, to ‘be rid of realism, to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it’ (17). On conversing with Richardson’s novel, Woolf probably realized that her own project was more exacting. Her essay is suffused with implicit counter-arguments or modulations brought to almost everything she praises: absence of linearity and plot, palpability of characters, heterogeneity of sequences, mimetic devices, shifts in focalization. Above all, she wished Richardson had gone a little further in charting the enigmatic connection between subjectivity and creativity, in experimenting with the potentialities of language. She writes that she cannot find anything in The Tunnel that might echo her own obsession with a pattern. It seems to her that Richardson’s narrative fails to combine the fluctuations of the modern mind with the necessity of an underlying structure. She admits that it is, indeed, most receptive to the ‘myriad impressions received on an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (‘Modern Fiction’ 10), but that, quite unfortunately, ‘the flying fragments’ do not cohere into a whole:

The method, if triumphant, should make us feel ourselves seated at the center of another mind, and, according to the artistic gift of the writer, we should perceive in the helter-skelter of flying fragments some unity, significance, or design. (16)

18For all these reasons, she considers that The Tunnel is a relative failure, or rather it is ‘better in its failure than most books in their success’ (17). One may wonder, therefore, about a potential ‘interaction conversationnelle’ between both authors, and if Woolf was indeed the ‘woman mounted upon a magnificently caparisoned charger’, the outstanding figure whom Richardson fancied she met on her ‘populous highway’ to fame. A few years later, when Richardson published Revolving Lights (1923), Woolf’s review entitled ‘Romance and the Heart’ was far more positive: in it she praises Richardson’s ‘pioneer spirit’:

She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. (51)

19She notes the many improvements in style:

Miriam is aware of ‘life itself’; or of the atmosphere of the table rather than of the table; of the silence rather than of the sound. Therefore she adds an element to her perception of things which has not been noticed before, or, if noticed, has been guiltily suppressed. (52)

  • 20 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘L’écriture féminine selon Virginia Woolf’, Etudes britanniques contemporain (...)

20In the meantime, Woolf had published Jacob’s Room (1922), a poetic response to the issue of femininity where she explores in detail the relationship between gender and thinking, gender and writing, and tries to voice female difference that affects human connections, meaning, feelings, reality as constructed by means of language. Woolf’s artistic experimentation certainly benefited from Richardson’s both tentative and illuminating inventions. Her influence shows also in the opening sequence of Mrs Dalloway (1925) where the stream-of-consciousness technique inaugurated by Woolf’s predecessor along with free indirect style combine to shape a discourse where there seems to be no more distance between narrator, character and reader, and where her private vision of Life rises. Yet, Woolf’s design was far more ambitious than Richardson’s and her stylistic treatment of both ‘the psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ (‘un objet impossible’, according to Lecercle)20 and ‘depth’ concentrated more on the very nature of words. For her, ‘capturing life’, capturing the sensations, thoughts and feelings, the very being of a character in words, required a special mode of saying capable of going well beyond the mere surface of language. It wanted a voice of its own whose vibrations might tell the mysterious interplay of body language and verbal language, of male order and female disorderliness, of sense and nonsense. What Woolf desired most was to reach the sublime, meaning beyond or even without words.

  • 21 Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes: ‘loin d’être un trope simple, [elle] est le processus créateur essent (...)

21What she learnt from Richardson’s ‘shortcomings’ was perhaps how to word silence; how to write the marks of silence connoted in the feminine and that should radiate through interlocking patterns of presence and absence. This is what she aimed at in her poetic prose that rests on a queer syntax emptied of its original function of articulation, and that makes silence become audible, tangible. In the traces of Richardson, she adopted the musical function of punctuation essential to the production of a rhythm which she associated with the feminine. Significantly, Woolf’s quest for truth and knowledge about Woman through art and fiction initiated (at least, partly) by Richardson’s innovative narrative form, led her to venture into those extra-linguistic zones of meaning where desire speaks, notably through the metaphor.21

A Review of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927)

  • 22 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).

22‘The Art of Fiction’, Woolf’s reply to Forster’s manifesto,22 focuses on the relation of fiction to life and ponders over the very nature of the literary work. After deploring that ‘almost nothing is said about words’ (124), Woolf concentrates on Forster’s conception of fiction, ‘a parasite which draws its sustenance from life, and must, in gratitude, resemble life or perish’ (124), and accuses him of being ‘too domestic’:

If the English critic were less domestic, less assiduous to protect the rights of what it pleases him to call life, the novelist might be bolder too. He might cut adrift from the eternal tea-table and the plausible and preposterous formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human adventure. But then the story might wobble; the plot might crumble; ruin might seize upon the characters. The novel in short might become a work of art. (125)

23What she finds most debatable in Forster’s treatise, is also his critical method that mixes low-key statements with incisive, biased judgements about male writers like Meredith, Hardy and James or about female writing, ‘saying things that sink airily enough into the mind to stay there and unfurl like those Japanese flowers which open up in the depths of water’ (122). Another disagreement with Forster is about the way he disconnects Life from fiction, or rather domesticity, the sphere of women’s lives from the work of art, asking ‘What is this ‘Life’ that keeps on cropping so mysteriously and so complacently in books about fiction? Why is it absent in a pattern and present in a tea party?’ (123). She then comments on Forster’s segregation between arts, between the humane and the aesthetic, arguing that the relation of Life to fiction should go through instincts, emotions, sensations, rather than through reflection, thought or reason, and condemns his ‘unaeasthetic attitude’ when he claims that:

The novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama. [. . .] We will not give up the hope of beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method than the pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of ‘rhythm’. (Forster 150)

24She also pleads for the specific identity of the literary work, arguing that ‘it fades like a mist, like a dream’ and that ‘while the painter, the musician, and the poet come in for their share of criticism, the novelist goes unscathed. [. . .] There is not a critic alive now who will say that a novel is a work of art and that as such he will judge it’ (125). Woolf extends mainly on chapter 7 where Forster exposes his conception of the modern novel in relation to Victorian constraints in terms of plot, pattern and rhythm. What Woolf understands from Forster’s examination of some famous fictional works, is that too many sacrifices have been granted to the plot that ‘shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing-room’. She finds Forster’s position too rigid, and advocates another type of plot more compatible ‘with the immense richness of material which life provides’. Woolf picks up some fundamental elements from Forster’s hypotext that eventually constitute her own theory of language and poetics of the subject, even though she considers sarcastically that ‘He is not going to theorize about fiction except incidentally; he doubts even whether she is to be approached by a critic, and if so, with was critical equipment’ (122). The main point of her discussion with Forster concerns the dialectics between plot, pattern and rhythm, and in the same way as he draws from Marcel Proust and ‘the music of Vinteuil’, she draws from Forster’s idea about rhythm and its impact on the creation of beauty and unity:

It [Pattern] springs mainly from the plot, accompanies it like a light in the clouds, and remains visible after it has departed. Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book, the book as a whole, the unity, and our examination would be easier if it was always this. But sometimes it is not. When it is not I shall call it rhythm. (Forster 140)

  • 23 ‘Le rythme n’est pas seulement un secteur du langage parmi d’autres, un niveau linguistique [. . .] (...)

25More precisely, on reading Forster’s discussion of pattern and rhythm based on both James’s The Ambassadors, where plot is constricting and characterization faulty, and on Proust’s musical descriptions where ‘the little phrase’ is present ‘by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope’ (Forster 153–54), Woolf probably met with her major challenge as a writer. Over the years, she became deeply convinced that literary discourse, i.e., the form itself with its rhythmic patterns and accents, should be able to perform the same part as the plot and become ‘the rope held to the reader’. For Woolf, anxious to invent new forms for the novel, rhythm was the main goal to reach. In To the Lighthouse and The Waves, she treated it as the locus where fixity and mobility, being at anchor and being adrift, identity and non-identity, utterance and subjectivity sometimes alternate or set apart, sometimes overlap and merge totally. She was convinced that it was more than merely a matter of prosody, of intonations. She believed that it should spring from the combination of syntax, sonorities, macro and micro-structures, repetitions, pauses, and that its main quality was trans-subjective: it was the place for a conversation between an ‘I’ and another ‘I’, between the self and the multitude of selves that compose it. Woolf thought of rhythm as an effect of sense that stems from a syntactic pattern or from the interaction of broken fragments of speech, disserved syllables, intelligible cries dispersed throughout literary discourse similar to those words flung ‘in fans like those the sower over the ploughed fields when the earth is bare’ (The Waves 138). In this novel, she experimented with poetry in prose, a mode which, to paraphrase Hermione Lee, ‘half reveals, half conceals the self’ (107), reshuffles identity and voice in the ebb and flow of the characters’ soliloquies, stitches the text from the inside until the rhythm becomes exactly ‘ce par quoi le sujet n’est pas un emploi des pronoms personnels, mais tout son langage, sémantique jusque dans l’infra-sémantique’.23

26In ‘The Modern Essay’, Virginia Woolf argues that:

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad. (47)

  • 24 Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris, Gallimard, 1969).

27And that ‘a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out’ (49). Her reviews do have this permanent quality: over the years, they bring her many readers together and involve them in ‘un entretien infini’24 where the reviewer herself is, in Barthes’s terms, a ‘transmetteur de paroles’.

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Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reviewing’ (1939) The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1993) 152–63.

2 Virginia Woolf, ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ (1924) The Common Reader. 1, ed. Andrew Mc Neillie (1925; London, The Hogarth Press, 1984) 231–41, 206–10.

3 See, for example, Alain Milon ‘L’enjeu du style ou la grammaire de la conversation’, L’art de la conversation (Paris: PUF, 1999) 137–58.

4 See Francis Jacques, ‘Stratégies interactionnelles. Conversation, négociation, dialogue’, Échanges sur la conversation, ed. Jacques Cosnier, Nadine Gelas, Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1988) 45–68.

5 Woolf exposes her own point of view in ‘The Modern Essay’ (1922) A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays: Volume One, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1992) 40–49.

6 Gérard Cahen ed., La conversation. Un art de l’instant (Paris: Éditions Autrement, n°182, 1999).

7 Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Essays’, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2000) 91–108, 96.

8 Virginia Woolf, ‘The American Woman’ [1905]; ‘Royalty’ [1934] (Bowlby 1992, 8–10; 154–158).

9 Virginia Woolf, ‘An Imperfect Lady’ [1920]; ‘Men and Women’ [1920]; ‘The Compromise’ [1923]; ‘Montaigne’ [1924] (Bowlby 1992; 24–26; 18–20; 53–55; 56–64).

10 For example: ‘a Greek gem’ (‘Men and Women’ 18) ; ‘the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year after year, through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to transparency’ (‘Montaigne’ 64) ; ‘a royal queen in a cage’ (‘Royalty’ 157).

11 Virginia Woolf, ‘Freudian Fiction’ [1920] (Bowlby 1992, 21–23, 21).

12 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Fiction’ [1927] (Bowlby 1992, 121–25, 121).

13 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’ [1920] (Bowlby 1992, 30–39).

14 See Mikhaïl Bakhtine’s Écrits in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique (Paris: Seuil, 1981) in particular ‘La structure de l’énoncé’, 287–316. Bakhtine argues that ‘le dialogue—l’échange de mots—est la forme la plus naturelle du langage. Davantage: les énoncés, longuement développés et bien qu’ils émanent d’un interlocuteur unique [. . .] sont monologiques par leur seule forme extérieure, mais par leur structure sémantique et stylistique, ils sont en fait essentiellement dialogiques’ (292).

15 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Tunnel’ [1919] (Bowlby 1992, 15–17).

16 See in particular ‘Women Novelists’, ‘The American Woman’, ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’, ‘Men and Women’, ‘An Imperfect Lady’, ‘Royalty’ (Bowlby 1992).

17 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1993) 5–12, 10.

18 Virginia Woolf, ‘Women Novelists’ [1918] (Bowlby 1992, 11–14).

19 See Robert Humphrey’s Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954) 9–14, 78–80.

20 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘L’écriture féminine selon Virginia Woolf’, Etudes britanniques contemporaines n° hors série, ed. Christine Reynier (1997): 16–29, 16.

21 Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes: ‘loin d’être un trope simple, [elle] est le processus créateur essentiel qui parcourt la langue, ou plus exactement sa trace à la surface linguistique. Elle est le porte-parole du reste’, La Violence du langage (Paris: PUF, 1996) 180.

22 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).

23 ‘Le rythme n’est pas seulement un secteur du langage parmi d’autres, un niveau linguistique [. . .] mais l’inscription du sujet dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre comme système des valeurs de langage, à travers le sens. Il est ce par quoi le sujet n’est pas un emploi des pronoms personnels, mais tout son langage, sémantique jusque dans l’infrasémantique’. Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982) 363.

24 Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris, Gallimard, 1969).

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Denise Ginfray, « Virginia Woolf’s Politics of Reviewing: a Place for Conversation  »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2024, consulté le 08 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15111 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwq

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Auteur

Denise Ginfray

Denise Ginfray is Professor of English Literature at the University Blaise Pascal-Clermont-Ferrand II. She has written a PhD and several articles on Virginia Woolf and is currently completing a book on Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad. She has also published on American literature, namely on Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein.

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