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The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The Sisters’ Arts’1

Liliane Louvel

Résumé

The issue of the visual, of the interrelationship between language/literature and painting appears to be central to Woolf’s aesthetic interrogation. She tried to find a satisfying solution to the inter-art dialogue but it was to no avail. She constantly found herself confronted with the wall of what she called the reticence of painting. Her response then was to accumulate words detailing the experience of the reception of the pictorial work. The question of meaning, of making sense of a picture prevented her from envisaging another way of looking at painting, seeing it as an experience, an event, engaging the viewer in another kind of aesthetic intercourse resisting language. The silence and the reticence of painting which, for Woolf, represented a mystery, sent her back to her own activity, to her work and what it was worth via the mirror-image of the sister art.
Apart from ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ and ‘Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’, the multiplicity of essays dedicated or referring to painting shows that Woolf was deeply inspired and moved by this art which she thought of in terms of the unreachable and much desired medium, at the same time feeling the need to reassert the superiority of language. This was grounded in a primary experience, that of her relationship to Vanessa and the sharing of the arts between the two sisters on the conversational mode.

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  • 1 I have already tried to approach the question of the sisters’arts in ‘“Oh to be Silent ! Oh to be a (...)

 

  • 2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994)1.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’, thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation’.2

1Young Alice’s wisdom shows she knew what she was talking about when she asked this question. As a young book-lover she recognized what made reading enjoyable: it meant something to look at, something to listen to. Enjoying a synesthetic experience, the reader is completely satisfied. Without pictures or conversation a book is said to be dull. This is supposed to be a little girl’s remark yet it ‘speaks volumes’ if I may say so. For it also shows that the reading experience requires the breaking up of whole blocks of letters arranged in ‘tiresome’ paragraphs of writing by the relaxing presence of illustrations or typographical blanks organizing the layout of dialogues or conversations. Pictures and conversations provide breathing spaces for the young reader repelled by the difficult task of keeping his/her mind focussed on words and sentences.

  • 3 Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princ (...)

2In this opening of a famous illustrated book, the setting includes two sisters, a book and the evocation of images and conversation. In a similar way, this paper will focus on two sisters, their conversation, particularly concerning books and pictures. For Vanessa and Virgina both represented the two terms of the celebrated ut pictura poesis formula, also called the interart analogy or ‘the sister arts’ relationship, which has triggered a pun on ‘the sisters’ arts’ coined by more than one critic.3 The sisters’ relationship enacted the emulation between the two arts and the complementarity of word and image, embodying the infinite dialogue between poetry and painting oscillating between an agonistic or/and an eirenic mode.

Each sister often denied any knowledge of the other’s medium, defended her own, and even at times doubted the other’s genius. At the same time, combining rivalry with admiration, polite compliments with genuine enthusiasm, each criticized, praised, and learned from the other’s work. Always aware of the visual arts, Woolf continually thought of and described her books as drawings, paintings, and statues. ‘I’m not sure’, she wrote to Roger Fry in 1918, ‘that a perverted plastic sense doesn’t somehow work itself out in words for me’ (Letters II 285 qtd in Gillespie 307–08).

  • 4 Review of a show starting on 7th November at the ADC, Cambridge, Park Street which the Woolfs atten (...)

3Woolf knew the formula she used to comment on Duncan Grant’s setting for A Lover’s Complaint by Shakespeare: ‘Mr Grant exquisitely emphasized the visual side of the poem by his decorations, and suggested how curiously the sister arts might illustrate each other if they chose’.4 The relationship between the readable and the visible, between language and the image as Woolf thought of it in her fiction as well as in her letters and her essays will show to what extent she engaged in a never-ending conversation with her sister held, as it were, over the top of a neighbouring wall separating the gardens of their own arts.

Literature and Conversation: an Appropriate Topic

  • 5 Emmanuel Bury, ‘Allusion et complicité: de la littérature comme conversation à l’époque classique’, (...)

4The art of conversation situates language and discourse first and foremost as a form of social exchange. Conversation was truly regarded as a form of art in XVIIth century France, for instance, as Emmanuel Bury describes it: ‘il faut toujours avoir à l’esprit les rapports étroits qu’entretiennent alors littérature et sociabilité. La littérature apparaît en effet comme un lieu d’échange par excellence’.5 Furthermore, it may be argued that conversation is what literature is about, according to what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has termed ‘l’échange interlocutif’, the interlocutionary exchange. To follow Lecercle, the literary text is the privileged locus of the staging of the rules of conversation (one thinks of Grice’s model). Indeed, Alice seems to deserve a paradigmatic status on this subject, for Lecercle demonstrates how she learns throughout the book how to use the rules of conversation and also how to transgress them. The literary text then stands as a means of transmitting knowledge.

  • 6 Jean-Jacques Lecercle et Ronald Shusterman, L’emprise des signes. Débat sur l’expérience littéraire(...)

La conversation est le jeu de langage où la réflexivité du langage dans le texte littéraire se laisse voir de la façon la plus manifeste. La littérature, naturellement, reproduit volontiers les conversations qui sont en quelque sorte le matériau du roman [. . .] et littéralement ce dont une pièce de théâtre est faite. Mais elle ne se contente pas de les (re)produire, elle les met en scène, elle en fait la théorie, en acte et parfois même sous forme de commentaire explicite. La conversation, avec sa théorie, est un des lieux où la littérature pense: car la conversation est objet d’étude pour la philosophie, et l’objet, crucial d’une pratique réflexive de la part de la littérature.6

  • 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’, Collected Essays, vol. II, ed. Leonard Woolf (Lon (...)

5Lecercle also signals that reading may be seen as a kind of conversation, a form of social intercourse of ‘l’être ensemble langagier’. But literature blurs the contours, introduces wrong signals and renders the limits between what may be said and seen less clear (Lecercle 240). Yet, for Lecercle, literature shows what it is: a way of practising language, a mode of speech. Conversation (from the Latin conversatio, a frequent abode in a place, an intercourse, a manner of life) truly entails a relationship as the etymology of ‘to converse’ indicates: ‘to associate with’; so do the terms ‘interview’ (which insists on exchanging views) and the French ‘entrevue’ whereas ‘entretien’ introduces the idea of holding together. And, truly, the people engaged in a conversation are ‘held together’, even if briefly, and share an experience of language. This is what Woolf stages in a famous essay at the centre of this analysis: ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’.7

  • 8 Philippe Hamon evokes the ‘cadre conversationnel [. . .] et qui dit conversation dit socialité, qui (...)
  • 9 Michael Toolan, ‘On the Centrality of Stylistics’, The European English Messenger XI/1 (Spring 2002 (...)

6Furthermore, conversation requires a contextualisation playing the same role as that of a frame around a painting. Language points to its frame and conversation could not be held without it. It is part and parcel of the process as Michael Toolan described it; for Toolan, as for Philippe Hamon,8 conversation implies ‘that we attend to its immediate nonverbal context’9 as it is ‘speech represented in writing’, a hybrid requiring contextualisation such as narratorial classification, framing clauses, adjacent sentences of speakers’ topics, motives, movements. It is an artifice, the best and well-known proof of it being that in natural conversation we do repeat ourselves and speak at the same time, whereas in represented conversation there is no such thing. In Woolf’s fiction or essays, a conversation is duly filtered and mediated by a narrator’s intervention telling the reader what this or that character was doing.

  • 10 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Triad, 1978) 151.

7I will venture to say that representing conversation is a Woolfian topos, its paradigm being The Waves that Woolf saw as ‘a gigantic conversation’.10 Numerous conversations are staged around the dinner table in To the Lighthouse, The Waves, or as preludes to a social event in Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts. We also perceive the rumours of voices coming from short stories such as ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘Solid Objects’, ‘A Society’. ‘The Evening Party’ stands close to such essays as ‘Walter Sickert’ and ‘The Moment: Summer’s Night’. In the latter, the conversational frame is marked by its rhythm, that of a moment, at twilight, on a summer evening, framed in by the lighting of matches when only voices can be heard in the slowly falling darkness. Then disembodied voices make up a pure form of conversation.

8Conversation is a practical way of staging a theoretical exchange to avoid boring development for the Alice-like reader. Plato already used the device but reduced it to a dialogue whereas a conversation may involve more than one speaker. When held around a dinner table it provides a form of unity as well as an opportunity for the emergence of a multiplicity of voices. Conversation is a mixture of spatial and temporal representation, for time is experienced through discourse which requires duration to develop, whereas the diners offer a static image. Only time moves on together with words. The story of a conversation is that of the unrolling of a discursive exchange. It is also often the conversion of life (or art) into a story as Woolf’s essay suggests. A particular type of conversation, that of the conversation between the arts, between two sisters, will be of interest here.

Conversation as Interartistic Dialogue: Conversation and the Sisters’Arts

  • 11 Angelica Garnett, ‘Vanessa Bell by Angelica Garnett’, The Bloomsbury Group: a Collection of Memoirs (...)

9As a biographical starting point, Angelica Garnett’s souvenir should be given pride of place: ‘their chief amusement was conversation’ and again: ‘I amused myself while they enjoyed what they called a good old gossip’.11 The two sisters enjoyed private conversations which also gave a pattern to the meetings of the Memoir Club. Voices as a means of seeing and making one see—what could be called the ‘voices of seeing’—provide a convenient conversational frame for the exchange between the sisters’ arts, and the recognition of otherness, the writer being the other of the painter, and vice versa.

  • 12 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Ne (...)

10Diane Gillespie notes that many discussions were held between the sisters concerning colour. They pursued their discussions in their letters: ‘I don’t see how you use colours in writing, but [. . .] perhaps you don’t really describe the looks but only the impression the looks made upon you’ (Gillespie 277) Vanessa wrote to Virginia for instance. ‘What a poet you are in colour’, Virginia Woolf said in 1940, complimenting Vanessa on a portrait of Quentin.12 Colour, for Woolf, will remain one of the confusing and challenging aspects of painting.

11Conversation between the two sisters then may be seen as taking the form of an interartistic dialogue, between painter and poet, which is also in the English tradition, that of ‘the conversation piece’ William Hogarth (1720) developed at the same time as the novel was emerging. It attempted to render ‘real life’, that of the prosperous middle-class engaged in everyday (often family) activities. The emergence of a new form of writing coincided with a new form of painting showing that the destinies of literature and painting were (more than once) interwoven.

12The two sisters often took up similar topics, each one treating them in her own medium: thus they both elaborated a portrait of Roger Fry (a picture and a biography), and drew up historical pictures of their friends: Vanessa in her painting of The Memoir Club, (in which pictures appear on the wall behind the sitters, thus exemplifying the self-referentiality of painting). Virginia Woolf in Orlando, ‘painted’ a portrait of Vita Sackville West and in her diary she composed ‘a gallery of little bright portraits hanging against the wall of my mind’. (A Writer’s Diary, 156).

13Both sisters indulged in the still-life genre: the cover of ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ by Vanessa, represents a fruit-dish reminding one of a similar fruit-dish in To the Lighthouse held under the intense gaze of Mrs Ramsay. The lighthouse motif inspired Vanessa who painted it on the tile fireplace at Charleston. Each sister portrayed the other one: Vanessa appears under the guise of Lily Briscoe the painter of To the Lighthouse whereas Vanessa Bell painted several portraits of her sister.

14Even the theme of conversation was taken up by both sisters: three paintings by Vanessa represent a conversation, that is words in image, the visual representation of a Woolfian topos, and the hybrid genre Woolf offered in ‘Walter Sickert’ is an essay shaped as a conversation. Street Corner Conversation, The Conversation, A Conversation Piece, stage a verbal exchange, the latter definitely signalling its interpictorial reference and its attempt at renewing the ‘Conversation Piece’ genre, as one of the sisters’contemporary painters, Orpen, also did with A Bloomsbury Family (1907). This painting shows another future painter’s family at home, that of Sir William Nicholson where Ben Nicholson figures as a child. As seen above, innumerable conversations are recorded in Woolf’s novels, short stories and essays. Thus, in a way, the two sisters entertained some kind of conversation, a dialogue by proxy, via the arts.

15The centrality of the word/image relationship, of the questioning of the text by the image when confronted with it, with its apparent mystery and its irreducibility, figures prominently in Woolf’s interrogation in her essays and her letters. At the same time, the visual adds flesh to critical discourse. Woolf embodied this in her works as the visual is deeply inscribed in her aesthetic and human questioning. For instance, painting stands as one of the privileged vehicles of her comparisons. Numerous examples are given by Diane Gillespie such as in The Voyage Out when

Rachel Vinrace observes Clarissa Dalloway ‘she wore a white dress and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes and her arch delicate face which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth century masterpiece—a Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly beside her beauty’ (Gillespie 216)

16The particular word/image relationship rests on a paradox: that of their irreconcilable otherness although language (poetry) constantly strives to ‘paint’ the image (painting). The inter-art ‘discourse’ is a ‘borderline’ one, something Woolf recognized when she evoked ‘the sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments’ (Walter Sickert 244). Let us venture the idea that the interchange between poetry and painting gives rise to a third element, a ‘tiers’ working in a way like the ‘he’ between the two ‘Is’ evoked by Jacques Rancière:

Même s’il est obsédé par la conversation, le texte littéraire introduit toujours le ‘il’ d’une instance tierce entre les deux ‘je’ qui dialoguent, et donc il introduit la division au sein de chaque ‘je’ (la division entre sujet d’énonciation et sujet d’énoncé): il introduit ce trait d’hétéronomie qui sépare soi de ‘soi’. (Rancière qtd in Lecercle & Shusterman 240)

17The pictorial ‘third’ oscillating between poetry and painting is the in-between medium through which the interarts dialogue or conversation may still take place, challenging the unspeakable of the visible/speakable, what is irreducible but nevertheless rendered possible because it is art, it is literature. Woolf knew it when she evoked the reticence of painting and not in painting. What worried her was the silence of painting. Thus she posited there was such a thing as a language of painting (and consequently the possibility of a silence emanating from it), or better, evaluating painting in terms of language. Although there was such a thing as an attempt at an interart conversation, at the end of the day, she had to admit painting remained silent, resisting all interpretation.

Art in Conversation: the Treatment of Art Through Conversation: ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’

18Once more, the biographical element may serve as a ‘starter’ to the dinner conversations Woolf evokes in the Preface to the catalogue of her sister’s exhibition in London:

Were it not that Mrs Bell has a certain reputation and is sometimes the theme of argument at dinner tables, many no doubt would stroll up Bond Street, past Messrs Cooling’s, thinking about morality or politics, about grandfathers or great aunts, about anything but pictures as is the way of the English. (Rosenbaum 170)

19Conversations held around dinner tables, reminiscent of the famous ‘bœuf en daube’ scene in To the Lighthouse were part and parcel of Bloomsbury life. One remembers the famous carnation image in The Waves representing the six young people gathered around the dinner table, Percival being ‘l’absent de tout bouquet’ to speak like Mallarmé but made present by dint of his friends’ discourse. More or less seven guests seems to be the rule for Woolf as in ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’, the famous essay often only entitled ‘Walter Sickert’. This does indeed stage a conversation, and starts by acknowledging the difficulty of recording such a thing:

Though talk is a common habit and much enjoyed, those who try to record it are aware that it runs hither and thither, seldom sticks to the point, abounds in exaggeration and inaccuracy, and has frequent stretches of extreme dullness. Thus when seven or eight people dined together the other night the first ten minutes went in saying how very difficult it is to get about London nowadays; was it quicker to walk or drive; did the new system of coloured lights help or hinder? Just as dinner was announced, somebody asked: ‘But when were picture galleries invented?’, a question naturally arising, for the discussing about the value of coloured lights had led somebody to say that in the eyes of a motorist red is not a colour but simply a danger signal. (‘Walter Sickert’ 233)

20Woolf naturally starts by enumerating the defects of normal talk before gradually offering a rewriting of this alleged discursive event. The presence of the narrator may strongly be felt in this extract as well as later on: ‘other instances of the change wrought upon our senses by modern conditions were then cited [. . .] This naturally led to the question when picture galleries were first opened’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 233; my emphasis). The frame and tone of the conversation are acknowledged (eight or seven people dined together ‘the other night’ in London). Woolf always makes sure that the reader does not forget the conversational frame carefully inserting ‘said the other’, three times for instance in one page (‘Walter Sickert’ 237). Here, the conversation is part and parcel of the title of the essay: it points to the system of representation which has been elected and clearly indicates the topic of the essay: the conversation between the arts, ‘an infinite dialogue’ as Foucault put it, between ‘words and things’. The adequation between the represented subject: a conversation in the text, and the representing one: a conversation of the text on language and its limits is achieved. Yet painting represents the far-beyond of language, what cannot be expressed, which is another way of staging the failure of language and of conversation as interartistic discourse.

  • 13 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1 (...)

21The conversation staged by Woolf debates on artistic questions offering a kind of philosophical exchange modelled on the Platonic paradigm. But it remains peripheral to the object itself. It delineates arabesques and whorls around the subject of painting which nonetheless opposes a steadfast resistance to any attempt at trying to make it speak. For Woolf the pictorial is an incentive, a call to a discursive development (fiction, description, reflection) even though she was taught by Fry to look at a painting from the point of view of the painter, that is to concentrate on its pictorial character. A fact she acknowledges: ‘But we, like most English people, have been trained not to see but to talk’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 236). Visiting an exhibition with a painter was a trial to her: ‘out the [writers] bolt, lest they should be caught at their mischief and made to suffer the most extreme of penalties, the most exquisite of tortures—to be made to look at pictures with a painter’.13

22The experience of colour is central to the essay and it triggers the comparison one of the diners offers between the visitor of a picture gallery and a kind of chameleon-like insect: ‘Were we once insects like that, too, one of the diners asked; all eye?’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 234) ‘becoming for the moment the thing they saw’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 234). Which is another way of acknowledging the importance of the eye, of the visual experience as a phenomenological one:

On first entering a picture gallery—there was silence for a moment. There was the famous Holbein; there were pictures by Picasso and Matisse; young English painters were holding an exhibition in Burlington Gardens, and there was a show of Sickert’s pictures at Agnew’s. When I first went into Sickert’s show said one of the diners, I became completely and solely an insect—all eye. I flew from colour to colour, from red to blue, from yellow to green. Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns, grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird. (‘Walter Sickert’ 235)

23After becoming ‘all eye’, after the experience of colour comes that of fiction making: ‘First, on entering a picture gallery, the violent rapture of colour; then we have soused our eyes sufficiently in that, there is the complexity and intrigue of character’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 236).

The Conversation of the Arts: The Language of Art

24The extraordinary essay about Walter Sickert shows that Woolf was puzzled by painting, not only by the experience of colour but above all by what she called its silence. Thus, she was giving new life to Simonides of Cheos’s famous aphorism ‘poetry is a speaking image, painting mute poetry’. Silence constantly reappears as a challenge to the writer: ‘Now they are going into the silent land’, ‘seeing things that they cannot see’, ‘cannot put words to it’ ‘we have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her way into the silent land’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 241), ‘the silent land lies before us’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 242). Words are compared to birds which ‘fold their wings [. . .] like rooks’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 241). The problem for Woolf is that painting resists any attempt at seizure, any attempt at taking part in a true conversation based on a reciprocal engagement.

25In the preface to the catalogue of Vanessa’s exhibition she assimilates the reticence of the painter to that of her painting, thus registering a refusal to ‘speak’. ‘But Mrs Bell says nothing. Mrs Bell is as silent as the grave. Her pictures do not betray her. Their reticence is inviolable’ (Essays 243). In front of such secrecy the question of the meaning of painting baffles her: ‘But what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words?’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 242) when the whole point is maybe to interrogate the validity of the question of ‘meaning’ in painting?

  • 14 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harvest, 1989).

26Then Woolf is irrepressibly led to make up for the silence of painting and to lend it speech. This is a recurring trait one finds throughout her work for instance in short stories such as ‘The Fascination of the Pool’ or ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’14 in which the narrator confronted with a silent surface—that of a pool, that of a looking-glass—is led to invent stories slowly erupting from them. Similarly, a message from the painting in absentia provokes the spectator who starts to think, interpret, elaborate a narrative about the pictorial work of art. A propos of Sickert, Woolf declares: ‘I should like to possess his works, for the purpose of describing them’ which is what her diners will do in the essay (Letters II, 331 qtd in Gillespie 94). Again in the preface to Vanessa’s exhibition, Woolf’s favourite colours green and blue baffle the interpreter: ‘Her vision excites a strong emotion and yet when we have dramatized it or poetised it or translated it into all the blues and greens, and fines and exquisites and subtles of our vocabulary, the picture itself escapes. It goes on saying something of its own’ (Rosenbaum 172).

27This remarkable passage shows Woolf’s acute conscience of the impossibility for language to throw a net of words over painting. The accumulation of adjectives used to encompass the beauty of the picture is of no avail. The strength of the picture, the ‘emotion’ it excites, resist any attempt at ‘translation’. But there is a message emanating from the picture which ‘goes on saying something of its own’ (my emphasis).

28The question we may ask then is what kind of language does art speak? What kind of language does Virginia Woolf herself use when she evokes art? What image of art does she convey? The essay discusses Sickert’s work not in terms proper to painting analysis but annexed to literary criticism: the painter is called a biographer, a novelist, a poet. The logocentric view prevails as Woolf stages a conversation in which the diners display a strong tendency to make up a quantity of stories to describe the pictures:

Yes, Sickert is a great biographer, said one of them; when he paints a portrait I read a life. Think of the picture of the disillusioned lady in full evening-dress sitting on a balcony in Venice. She has seen every sort of sunrise and sunset whether dressed in diamonds or white night-gown; now all is ruin and shipwreck; and yet the tattered ship in the background still floats. For though Sickert is a realist he is by no means a pessimist. (‘Walter Sickert’ 235)

29Something she seems to criticize as

Laughter drowned the last words. The portrait of the lady on the balcony had suggested nothing of the kind to most of the others. Had she lovers or not—it did not matter; [. . .] And they fetched a book of photographs from Sickert’s paintings and began cutting off a hand or a head, and made them connect or separate, not as a hand or a head but as if they had some quite different relationship. (‘Walter Sickert’ 235)

30And once more painting remains aloof, rejecting those who are not painters to its ‘borders and margins’, to its ‘outskirts’, making of them ‘outsiders’. The ‘silent land’ remains unspoilt by language:

Now they are going into the silent land; soon they will be out of reach of the human voice, two of the diners said, watching them. They are seeing things that we cannot see [. . .] what excites them in those photographs is something so deeply sunk that they cannot put words to it. [. . .] And those who are almost on a par with the artists, like our friends who are looking at the pictures, cannot impart what they feel when they go beyond the outskirts. They can only open and shut their fingers. We must resign ourselves to the fact that we are outsiders, condemned for ever to haunt the borders and margins of this great art. (‘Walter Sickert’ 236)

31But after examining the case of Sickert as a biographer, the diners keep on assimilating his work to that of a maker of worlds with words such as a novelist: ‘yet to me Sickert always seems more of a novelist than a biographer, said the other. [. . .] it is difficult to look at them and not to invent a plot, to hear what they are saying. To remember the picture of the old publican, with his glass on the table before him and a cigar gone cold at his lips’. Evoking the celebrated L’ennui, the diner proceeds to its ekphrasis and then weaves a whole world around the people, animating the picture, inserting sounds, feelings, endowing the people in the painting with a past. Another diner does the same for another Sickert picture called Nuit d’amour then Marie and Rose (whose actual title is Rose and Marie), ‘then again there is the story of Marie and Rose—a grim, a complex, a moving and at the same time a heartening and rousing story’ concluding with ‘There are any number of stories and three-volume novels in Sickert’s exhibition’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 238). The diners go even further wondering ‘But to what school of novelists does he belong? He is a realist, of course, nearer to Dickens than to Meredith’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 238).

32The diners even imagine they can enter the painting as Diderot pretended he did for Grimm to be able to follow his description: ‘Nothing could be more enjoyable than to sit behind the shop with the French innkeeper [. . .] and we should sit and talk and sing songs and crack jokes’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 240). Then leaving the question of Sickert’s realism the diners envisage him as a poet evoking the figure of synesthesia: ‘One can almost hear his gold and red dripping with a little splash into the waters of the canal’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 240). Many poets are evoked again as points of comparison to end up once more in the ultimate confrontation with silence:

But here the speakers fell silent. Perhaps they were thinking that there is a vast distance between any poem and any picture; and that to compare them stretches words too far. At last, said one of them, we have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her way into the silent land. [. . .] Let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see. [. . .] They both speak at once, striking two notes to make one chord, stimulating the eye of the mind and of the body. (‘Walter Sickert’ 241)

33The parallel between the arts is clearly stated here as well as the phenomenological implication of experiencing art when ‘the eye of the mind and of the body’ is solicited, ending up with the declaration of the superiority of literature as writers, after being made anxious by painters, are possibly in command of the all-encompassing art: are they not capable of making the reader see images and hear sounds like a musician. ‘It is a very complex business, the mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably unconsciously, in the poet’s mind to feed the reader’s eye. All great writers are great colourists, just as they are musicians into the bargain’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 241) and of course Shakespeare is called to the rescue: ‘each of Shakespeare’s plays has its dominant colour. And each writer differs of course as a colourist’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 241–42).
Yet the arts may find a common ground however tenuous, it is a ‘sunny margin’:

They have gone much farther into the forest than we shall ever go, said one of the talkers, sadly. We only catch a glimpse now and then of what lives there; we try to describe it and we cannot; and then it vanishes, and having seen it and lost it, exhaustion and depression overcome us; we recognize the limitations which Nature has put upon us, and so turn back to the sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments. (‘Walter Sickert’ 243)

34The artist as raider, borrower of the other arts’ techniques is a hybrid:

When we talk of his biographies, his novels, and his poems we may not be so foolish as it seems. Among the many kinds of artists, it may be that there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the land of others. Sickert it may be is among the hybrids, the raiders. (‘Walter Sickert’ 243)

‘Conversation piece’: the Artist and the Reader Held in Conversation

35What has the reader gained by examining the issue of conversation in Woolf’s work and particularly in the Sickert essay? Probably a better comprehension of the way she envisaged painting but also needs explaining her own art when confronted with a rival one which seemed to defeat her usual expectations. After having read ‘Walter Sickert: a Conversation’ one may draw a certain number of conclusions that would require further elaboration.

  • 15 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Yale: Yale University Press, 1985).

36First let it be said then that art criticism definitely appears as the ‘minor kind of literary genre’ Michael Baxandall defined in Patterns of Intention.15 Woolf manages to stage a situation in which an aesthetic if not a philosophic issue is at stake. The conversational framework provides a suitable atmosphere to render the discussions and points of view revolving around the question of art in a vivid way.

37The issue of the visual, of the interrelationship between language/literature and painting appears to be central to Woolf’s aesthetic interrogation. She tried to find a satisfying solution to the inter-art confrontation but it was to no avail. She constantly finds herself confronted with the wall of what she calls the reticence of painting. Her response then is to accumulate words detailing the experience of the reception of the pictorial work. Even though Roger Fry and Vanessa instructed her on how to look at a painting, she could not help calling language to the rescue. The question of meaning, of making sense of a picture prevented her from envisaging another way of looking at painting, seeing it as an experience, an event, engaging the viewer in another kind of aesthetic intercourse resisting language. Yet she felt there was something beyond the boundary which remained unthinkable for her at the time.

38The silence and the reticence of painting which, for Woolf, represented a mystery, sent her back to her own activity, to her work and what it was worth via the mirror-image of the sister art, reflecting an enantiomorphous mirror-image, i.e. an inverted one, a biased and confusing one. After all it was she who exclaimed: ‘Oh to be silent! oh to be a painter’ (Essays 243).

  • 16 Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (1948; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch 1974).
  • 17 Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, (...)
  • 18 Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975).

39Apart from ‘Walter Sickert’ and ‘Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’, the multiplicity of essays dedicated or referring to painting such as ‘Roger Fry’,16 ‘Three Pictures’,17 ‘The Fleeting Portrait’,18 ‘The Private View of the Royal Academy’ (Essays III), ‘Plays and Pictures’ (Essays IV), ‘Pictures’ (Essays IV), ‘Pictures and Portraits’ (Essays III), ‘Portraits of Places’ (Essays I), ‘It is Strange As One Enters the Mansard Gallery’ (Essays III), ‘The Leaning Tower’ (Collected Essays I), shows that Woolf was deeply inspired and moved by painting which she thought of in terms of the unreachable and much desired medium, at the same time feeling the need to reassert the superiority of language. As seen above, this was grounded in a primary experience, that of her relationship to Vanessa and the sharing of the arts between the two sisters. A wise solution to questions of rivalry:

  • 19 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London, Penguin 1977–84 (...)

Orlando is recognized for the masterpiece it is. The Times does not mention Nessa’s pictures. Yet, she said last night, I have spent a long time over one of them [. . .] Then I think to myself, So [sic] I have something, instead of children, I fall comparing our lives. I note my own withdrawal from those desires; my absorption in what I call, inaccurately, ideas: this vision.19

40One may notice that ‘ideas’ reappear more accurately under the shape of ‘vision’. For the importance of impressions, of sensations and the overall presence of the ‘eye’ in Woolf’s work resound in an astoundingly contemporary way reminding one of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s:

  • 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 28.

Le peintre, quel qu’il soit, pendant qu’il peint, pratique une théorie magique de la vision. Il lui faut bien admettre que les choses passent en lui ou que selon le dilemme sarcastique de Malebranche, l’esprit sort par les yeux pour aller se promener dans les choses puisqu’il ne cesse d’ajuster sur elles sa voyance.20

41Thus the world is apprehended, seized and enjoyed by seeing it and experiencing what Riegl called the haptic. This approach testifies to a desire to encompass or englobe the whole thing (the globe image is recurrent in Woolf’s imagery): of a desire to master language and vision even though the task seems doomed to failure. Furthermore the constant celebration of the superiority of literature over painting, of language over vision, reveals an uneasiness about one’s capacity for rendering the world and an attempt at encompassing it all in spite of everything. At the same time, this accounts for the series of trials and their magnificent failures and successes, for the tension of the artist trying to appropriate the world, to integrate it deep inside, as its flesh, so as to make it last, so as not to lose anything and for the artist to last too by dint of his/her surviving work. Each reading will renew the link and revive the text doomed to silence once the book has been closed. Eventually, the ultimate conversation will be the one held between the voice and the images emanating from the book and the reader. On a ‘sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments’ (‘Walter Sickert’ 243).

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Notes

1 I have already tried to approach the question of the sisters’arts in ‘“Oh to be Silent ! Oh to be a Painter” ”the sisters’arts”: Virginia and Vanessa’, Virginia Woolf. Le pur et l’impur, colloque de Cerisy, 2001, ed. Catherine Bernard et Christine Reynier (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002)149–65.

2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994)1.

3 Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’Arts, The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse & New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988).

4 Review of a show starting on 7th November at the ADC, Cambridge, Park Street which the Woolfs attended on 10th November, published in Nation and Atheneum, 17th November 1928.

5 Emmanuel Bury, ‘Allusion et complicité: de la littérature comme conversation à l’époque classique’, L’allusion dans la littérature (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2000) 83. He also quotes Marc Fumaroli, ‘La conversation’, Trois institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) 113–210.

6 Jean-Jacques Lecercle et Ronald Shusterman, L’emprise des signes. Débat sur l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 2002) 44.

7 Virginia Woolf, ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’, Collected Essays, vol. II, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966) 233–44.

8 Philippe Hamon evokes the ‘cadre conversationnel [. . .] et qui dit conversation dit socialité, qui dit socialité dit règles et hiérarchies, dit lieux concrets cadrant cette socialité, dit réunion dans ces lieux de classes, de générations et de sexes différents’, ‘De l’allusion en régime naturaliste’ (Bury 184).

9 Michael Toolan, ‘On the Centrality of Stylistics’, The European English Messenger XI/1 (Spring 2002) 21.

10 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Triad, 1978) 151.

11 Angelica Garnett, ‘Vanessa Bell by Angelica Garnett’, The Bloomsbury Group: a Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975) 177.

12 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1980) 294.

13 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986) 243.

14 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harvest, 1989).

15 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Yale: Yale University Press, 1985).

16 Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (1948; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch 1974).

17 Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1974).

18 Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975).

19 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London, Penguin 1977–84).

20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 28.

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Liliane Louvel, « The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The Sisters’ Arts’  »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2024, consulté le 12 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15121 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwr

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Liliane Louvel

Liliane Louvel, Professor of British literature at the University of Poitiers, has written extensively and published three books on the interrelationship between word and image: L’Œil du texte (Toulouse, PUM, 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l’art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire textes à voir (Rennes: PUR 2002). She has also edited two collections of essays on the subject.

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