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Conversation Redefined: Notes on ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’

Christine Reynier

Résumé

This paper offers a close reading of ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’ and argues that in this short fiction Woolf goes beyond the satirical intent and redefines conversation as Greek art, an art deprived of all superfluous detail and narration, rhythmical and impersonal. She thus turns conversation into a theoretical model for her own fiction.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (1985; London: Triad Grafton Books, 19 (...)

1‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, a short fiction in Susan Dick’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s Complete Shorter Fiction,1 is a somewhat cryptic text, rarely mentioned by critics. With such a title, it seems to qualify immediately for today’s discussion on conversation.

2This short fiction is about a party of Englishmen who ride down Mount Pentelicus, near Athens, on the back of donkeys. Their Greek guides and the slopes of Mount Pentelicus whose marble blocks were transformed into the most beautiful Greek statues, are described at length. The party then stops in the shade and the Englishmen strike up a conversation which only ends when a Greek monk appears. The conversation consists mainly in a dialogue between two unnamed speakers who defend their own points of view on Greek art, the first lamenting the difference between modern and ancient Greeks as well as the loss of Ancient Greek art which was synonymous with perfection, while the second speaker, a scholar, sees no difference between modern Greeks and ancient Greeks.

3This text could easily lend itself to a biographical reading. Indeed, in the notes appended to her edition of the short story, Susan Dick shows that although it is undated, it was probably written on Woolf’s return from Greece which she visited in September 1906 with her sister Vanessa and her brothers Thoby and Adrian. And their climb up Mount Pentelicus together with their encounter with two (not one) monks being related in the journal she kept at the time, the biographical basis of the story cannot be questioned. Yet it does not help the reader to understand the story any better.

  • 2 S. P. Rosenbaum, ‘Virginia Woolf: “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus”’, TLS, September 11–17 1987, 9 (...)

4S. P. Rosenbaum, one of the rare critics to have commented upon that piece, is more sensitive to the literary dimension of the text and suggests that the prose satire of Thomas Love Peacock, an eighteenth-century satirist, mentioned in the text, serves as a model for the dialogue form Woolf uses here (Rosenbaum 1987).2 And it is true that the satirical mode is privileged by the writer in this text which can read as a satire of former public school boys indulging in a highbrow conversation, bragging about their knowledge of Greek and finally proving unable to converse with real living Greeks. The author mocks the arrogance of these pretentious Harrow boys who rather than acknowledging the limits of their kowledge, i.e. that the Greek they learnt belongs to a dead past, consider the living Greeks as barbarians and adopt a spiteful attitude towards them.

  • 3 S. P. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury. The Early History of the Bloomsbury Group. Vol. 2 (London: M (...)

5These two readings could be brought together through possible reminiscences of Bloomsbury’s art of conversation. Indeed, the group of Englishmen sitting around talking about various subjects reads as an image of the party Woolf went to Greece with as well as a ‘Bloomsbury symposium’,3 an image of the group of friends who met informally in Bloomsbury. And the satire of the Harrow boys may well be based on Woolf’s own observation of her brothers and their friends from Cambridge: ‘the principal speakers are easily recognizable, one with his recent third in the Cambridge tripos and the other with his new MA, as Adrian and Thoby Stephen’ (Rosenbaum 1994, 191).

6Without excluding these two readings, I would suggest a third one. Taking into account the fact that Woolf wrote an essay entitled ‘A Vision of Greece’ in June 1906 before going to Greece, I will argue that the story is not so much about Woolf’s voyage to Greece as about Greece as a vision or a concept; and by looking at the detail of the text, I will show that this satirical conversation masks a satire of conventional conversation as inadequate and a concomitant redefinition of conversation; in other words, it provides the reader with a theory of conversation.

Greek Art as a Conversational Topic

7In the text, the conversation between the two Englishmen is introduced in the following way:

But since dialogues are even more hard to write than to speak, and it is doutbtful whether written dialogues have ever been spoken or spoken dialogues have ever been written, we will only rescue such fragments as concern our story. (65)

8In other words, a conversation has never been transcribed in literature or what has been transcribed is not a conversation. In this key passage, Virginia Woolf points to the impossibility of copying or even representing spoken words in a written text and therefore to the inadequacy of the literary means of representation, and particularly, of mimetic writing. After thus summarily dismissing in three lines a whole literary tradition, ranging at least from Jane Austen to the Victorian novel, she offers the reader a dialogue between two Englishmen on Mount Pentelicus. This might well appear as sheer self-contradiction if the dialogue were not introduced by these words: ‘the talk was the finest talk in the world’ (65). The superlative form ‘the finest’ suggests that the following talk will read as an exemplum, a model conversation; in other words, a new form of conversation in literature.

  • 4 Rosenbaum writes that ‘A Vision of Greece’ ‘begins with a map and goes on to speculate how disillus (...)

9The topic of the Englishmen’s conversation is Greek art. To my mind, it is significant that Woolf should broach the topic of Greek art, its perfection and perennial nature in a conversation. This is a main difference with the diary she kept at the time of her trip to Greece where ‘a trip to Mount Pentelicus near Athens is recounted, but without dialogue, and the appearance of an ancient monk carrying brushwood is unremarkable’ (Rosenbaum 1994, 192). It is also a major change compared with ‘A Vision of Greece’ where she speculates on the decadence of Greece before offering a vision of the Maiden Goddess but no dialogue.4 By choosing, in ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, to discuss Greek art in a conversation, Woolf foregrounds conversation. This choice inevitably reverberates on the nature of conversation. If Greek art and perfection have something to do with conversation, conversation must have something to do with perfection and Greek art. In other words, I will argue that the topic of these characters’ talk is a way for Woolf of defining conversation. Since their talk is ‘the finest talk in the world’, it is a model talk not simply because it is about Greek art but because it is Greek art. The two become interchangeable as the text shifts from Greek art as a conversational topic to a definition of conversation as Greek art.

Conversation as Greek Art

10In the course of the talk Greek art is defined by the first speaker as ‘paring down the superfluous’:

the Greeks by paring down the superfluous had revealed at last the perfect statue, or the sufficient stanza, just as we obversely by cloaking them in our rags of sentiment and imagination had obscured the outline and destroyed the substance. (66)

11And the conversation itself exemplifies the very process of ‘paring down the superfluous’ that the speaker describes as typical of Greek art. It proceeds by elimination and selection both in its substance and its outline. Before the speakers come to deal with Greek art, various conversational topics are eliminated:

It ranged over many subjects—over birds and foxes, and whether turpentine is good in wine—how the ancients made cheese—the position of women in the Greek state—that was eloquent!—the metres of Sophocles—the saddling of donkeys [. . .]. (65)

  • 5 See Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).

12The elimination of commonplace topics in favour of a more general and weighty one (‘the tough old riddle of the modern Greek and his position in the world today’, 65) makes it clear that conversation is not conceived here as small talk or ‘conversation mondaine’ which, as in Proust’s case and according to Deleuze, would be the enemy of writing.5

13As a result of the elimination of superfluous elements, the outline of the conversation becomes visible and it is presented as a fragment: ‘we will only rescue such fragments as concern our story’, says the narrator (65). And indeed, the conversation starts in medias res before being interrupted by the arrival of the monk. Woolf offers ‘slices of conversation’ as she will offer ‘slices of life’ in her novels, which is a blunt denial of any attempt at narrativity, linearity and exhaustivity. The phrase ‘we will only rescue such fragments’ highlights the process of elimination and selection at work in the creation of conversation. Fragmentation is thus presented as a deliberate æsthetic choice and not as a defeat of the writer.

14The Englishmen’s conversation is then evoked as ‘sinking and surging like the flight of an eagle’ (65). Through this comparison, the notion of rhythm is introduced. The process of ‘paring down the superfluous’ also results in making the rhythm of conversation perceptible and rhythm being a major component of music or poetry, conversation begins to look or sound like a piece of music or a poem.

  • 6 T. S. Eliot will write in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘Poetry is not the turning loose o (...)
  • 7 ‘Greek literature is the impersonal literature’, Woolf writes in ‘On Not knowing Greek’ and goes on (...)

15The paring down process is also at work on the discourse of the two speakers, both on its grammar and its rhetoric. Its grammar, first. The narrative voice first summarizes the position of the different participants in the conversation (‘some [. . .] claimed, some [. . .] expected, others [. . .] recalled.’) before one speaker is singled out: ‘Such a people he said. . . such a people were as sudden as the dawn, and died as the day dies here in Greece, completely’ (65). Although direct discourse is used to transcribe the speaker’s words, the latter are not clearly separated from the narrator’s; no inverted commas appear and the narrator keeps interrupting the speaker’s discourse and commenting upon it. Little by little, the narrator’s voice becomes silent and the speaker’s direct discourse takes over. As for the second speaker’s discourse, except for the introductory verb "he said", it is a direct discourse only and it is placed within inverted commas so that his discourse comes unmediated to the reader, no narrator, whether neutral or vaguely linked with the authorial figure, intruding upon it. It is an impersonal discourse in the sense Woolf, like T. S. Eliot,6 ascribes to the term, i.e a discourse devoid of the imprint of the author’s personality, a discourse as impersonal as Greek art, itself the epitome of impersonality according to Woolf.7 Conversation is thus defined here as the locus of the disappearance of the author’s voice and consequently appears as very close to drama.

  • 8 In A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Granada, 1978) Woolf will add that art transcends sex: ‘it is (...)

16In the substance of his speech, the first speaker, in a very pompous style, voices his unconditional admiration of the ancient Greeks and laments the loss of Greek art, a bare and unsentimental form of perfection. The second speaker then cannot help pointing to the contradictions in this eulogy of Greek art: ‘“When you talk of the Greeks”, he said, “you speak as a sentimentalist”’ (66). According to him, although his interlocutor claims to admire Greek art, his verbosity and pomposity betray the Greek spirit, the Greeks’ desire for bareness. And the scholar further suggests that what the first speaker admires in Greek art is not its ‘Greekness’ but its beauty. He shows the other that the term ‘The Greeks’ is synonymous neither with a people nor a specific historical period but with ‘the unknown, dream and desire’, i.e. utopia, perfection, beauty, truth or ‘the soul of beauty’. Thus ‘The Greeks’ is shown to refer to an ideal and works as a concept; any of its synonymous terms (beauty, truth, etc.) could easily be used to refer to the same thing. Therefore, the scholar comes to the conclusion that there is no point in lamenting the loss of the ancient Greeks and ancient Greek or in despising the modern Greeks, since men have nothing to do with a concept. Consequently, the first speaker should ‘drop’ the word Greek and talk about art or beauty, thus implementing the process of ‘paring down the superfluous’ the Greeks advocated, a process leading to a form of impersonality, the very process Woolf implements in this conversation by depriving her speakers of names. An impersonal art would here be given an added meaning, that of an art without any grounding in space or time, an art transcending geographical and historical boundaries.8

17Just as, through the ‘paring down of the superfluous’, the Greek sculptor reveals the perfect statue and the Greek poet ‘the sufficient stanza’ (66), conversation, through the process of elimination and selection we have examined, is made perfect. This very perfection is revealed metaphorically by the arrival of the monk, himself an allegory of art, of what Woolf calls the ‘soul of beauty’: ‘he was large and finely made, and had the nose and brow of a Greek statue’ (67). The monk symbolizes the perfect shape of a statue or the perfect outline of a work of art. A strange and striking figure, he mainly appears as a man with a compelling gaze: ‘Such was the force of the eye that fixed them, for it was not only clarified by the breeze among the olive groves but it was lit by another power which survives trees and even plants them’ (67). The intensity and clarity of the monk’s gaze reveal the intensity and clarity that conversation has achieved in the course of the process of elimination and selection. The monk’s gaze reveals the very saturation of conversation that comes with the ‘paring down’ process. Finally, the monk addresses the Englishmen and says ‘good evening’ in Greek. This single word brings the conversation to a close as well as to its climax; by its very bareness, it displays the intensity of perfect conversation. By then, the conversational topic, Greek art, has become the very model of the conversational form; conversation has become Greek art.

Conversation Redefined

  • 9 ‘It is Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends m (...)

18Such a reading of ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’ takes us quite far from the initial biographical and satirical readings. The form of the conversation Woolf imagines is at first reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue. Indeed, the pattern of the conversation leading to the revelation of truth may appear as an illustration of the Socratic method Woolf was to describe later.9 However the form of truth revealed by the dialogue of the Englishmen is not of a philosophical nature but of an æsthetic one. Although the talk is about beauty, the final revelation provides a vision of beauty, the vision of the monk. And although the monk is necessarily evocative of religion and his very appearance, when coming out of the bush, is reminiscent of God appearing to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3: 2–4), the only beauty he sends back to is not of a transcendental nature but belongs to the conversation leading to his own appearance; he only illuminates the conversation or makes its beauty visible. Thus the religious connotations are as it were, secularized, and truth is shown to be of an æsthetic nature only. At this point the conversation comes out as doubly subversive, both of the possibility of transcendental truth and of the Platonic dialogue as a model. The model Woolf propounds instead is a form of conversation synonymous with Greek art, which is defined here as an art deprived of all superfluous detail and narration, rhythmical and impersonal in its transgression of personal, geographical or historical boundaries, clear, intense and incandescent. In this short story, Woolf brings together elements that she will take up separately later in an essay and in her diary. In her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, written in 1925, she will extol in similar terms the virtues of Greek literature, the ‘bareness and abruptness’ of drama and poetry (47) as well as the Greek language, its rhythm and ‘the compactness of the expression’ (48):

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves [. . .] so clear, so hard, so intense. (49)

19The process consisting in ‘paring down the superfluous’ and achieving a vision of intensity and clarity is referred to later in her diary while she is writing The Waves, but in more neutral terms and these are linked with the creation of a new genre partaking of poetry and drama:

  • 10 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (London: Triad Grafton Books, 1978) November 28, 1928.

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity [. . .] The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate.10

  • 11 See in this volume Ariane Mildenberg’s article on this subject.

20So the way in which, in ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, she defines and foregrounds conversation while equating it with Greek art foreshadows her ‘playpoem’ (Diary Novembre 7, 1928) to come, The Waves, where the concomitant processes of elimination and saturation will be at work in a ‘gigantic conversation’.11

21In her early short story, although she foregrounds conversation—if only through the title—Woolf frames it within a narrative. Yet the narrative only seems to function as a mirror of the conversational part, reflecting both the nature of conversation as art and the creative process itself. Indeed, at the beginning, the narrative voice evoking the ride down the mountain and then the stillness of the talkers resting in the shade is also a way of evoking the movement preceding the stasis of art, here conversation, a form of art characterized by hybridity just as Mount Pentelicus, bearing the traces of elation and suffering, stands in-between beauty and ugliness, a form of art which has resisted the writer and yielded to her just as the marble blocks resisted the sculptor’s chisel and yielded to it.

  • 12 See also the image of the ‘ring of gold’ and the ‘golden chain’ running ‘through ages and races’ (6 (...)
  • 13 Eliot defines tradition in the following way: ‘It involves, in the first place, the historical sens (...)

22At the end of the short story, the narrative voice comes back and tells the story of the monk’s appearance. From a structural point of view, the monk merely discloses the truth, ‘the soul of beauty’ that was already present in the conversation, which means that there is, strictly speaking, no revelation, only recognition. In a way, this makes the role of the monk redundant and explains why Woolf will be able to dispense with narration in The Waves and resort only to conversation, the latter including the metaphors, allegories and other figures which are external to it here. Secondly, the figure of the monk is also a way of questioning the linear process leading up to a ‘revelation’, a climax in a conventional story. The monk only makes what was already there apparent just as Woolf makes apparent and alive a form of beauty that has existed for ages, since ancient Greek artists produced their sculptures, plays and poems: ‘For there is, you know, a soul of beauty that rises unchristened over the words of Milton as it rises over the Bay of Marathon yonder’ (66).12 Thus, through the figure of the monk, the author places herself within a certain tradition (the Greek and the Russian tradition running through to Elizabethan art, as she will show in a later essay), within continuity as T. S. Eliot will do in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.13

  • 14 Claritas is quidditas [. . .] This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that th (...)

23From a metaphorical point of view, the monk reveals, with great power, through the intensity and clarity of his gaze, the very qualities the conversation has been displaying, what Woolf calls ‘the soul of beauty’ and what Joyce also calls the ‘soul’ in Stephen Hero, i.e. the supreme quality of beauty. So Woolf’s notions of intensity and clarity are reminiscent of Joyce’s concept of claritas, as quidditas, radiance or the ‘whatness of a thing’ which is revealed through the experience of epiphanies.14 But above all the way in which Woolf uses the figure of the monk as an allegory of art and his appearance as a metaphor of the epiphanic encounter with beauty seems to me similar to what Æschylus does with metaphors and which she describes in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’:

By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid. (Essays 45)

24Similarly the monk makes the ‘soul of beauty’ apparent or even blinding; he lays bare the whatness of conversation.

  • 15 J. B. Bullen, introduction to Roger Fry, Vision and Design, (1920; Oxford: Oxford University Press, (...)
  • 16 See especially ‘An Essay in Æsthetics’ in Vision and Design.
  • 17 Yet Bullen adds that Fry disagreed with Tolstoy when it came to measuring art by moral criteria.

25In the end, the story is about the form of the conversation which, through elimination and selection, achieves ‘intensity and clarity’ or saturation; it is the story of a purified form which creates æsthetic emotion. Such a vision of art is very close to the vision of Roger Fry who in 1906 realised that Cézanne ‘had created a new pictorial language in which form and structure had taken precedence over imitation’,15 and which allowed æsthetic emotion to be derived only from the lines, shapes and colours of the work of art.16 And Fry himself, as Bullen notices, was very much indebted to Tolstoy’s book What is Art? (1898) in which he argues that art is not the creation of beauty but ‘the generation of expressive forms which communicate emotion’ (Fry XV).17

  • 18 Which the monk also symbolizes through his intensity and incandescence, the qualities of the artist (...)
  • 19 The transgression of the boundaries between human and non-human elements is also hinted at here in (...)

26In the end, what Woolf defines as Greek art is also her own art or at least the art she yearns for. By equating conversation with Greek art and defining it as neither spoken nor written, she defines a new space for art, a space in-between spoken and written words (which makes all discussions of whether the voices’ words, in The Waves, are supposed to be spoken or not irrelevant), a space in-between drama and poetry. Such an early definition of conversation will lead to the author’s future developments on art as androgynous, itself in the image of the androgynous artistic mind,18 an art transgressing boundaries, whether generic, geographical or historical.19

  • 20 ‘L’auteur dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle pa (...)
  • 21 ‘La nouvelle convention linguistique, la structure formelle de l’œuvre, est donc la transversalité, (...)

27Eventually, the choice of the conversational form as the locus of art presupposes, even if conversation is redefined, a form of exchange between voices. Conversation is also here a space of exchange literally, between the two fictional speakers but also between impersonal and personal voices—the impersonal voices of the unnamed speakers and the most personal voice of the author speaking through them and defending her own conception of art in a paradoxical combination reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert’s own dilemma (since he defended a new impersonal art20 while claiming ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’); conversation is furthermore, as we have seen in passing, a dialogue between Woolf and other artists ranging from Æschylus to Roger Fry, T. S. Eliot or James Joyce. Conversation thus becomes synonymous not so much with intertextuality as with what Deleuze calls, in his analysis of Proust’s work, ‘transversality’.21

  • 22 See Christiane Bimberg who writes about A Room of One’s Own: ‘A major characteristic of the essay i (...)
  • 23 Jean-Jacques Lecercle et Ronald Shusterman, L’Emprise des signes (Paris: Seuil, 2002) 235, my trans (...)
  • 24 See Alain Badiou, L’Ethique (Paris: Hatier,1993) 4.

28Furthermore, representing æsthetic emotion is a way of letting the reader enter the text, of enlarging the conversation and transversality so as to include a cooperation between the writer and the reader.22 The question that arises at this point is whether the bringing together of these various voices turns conversation into an ethical space. Ethics, in the etymological sense of the word, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle reminds us, is ‘the art of being together, the Greek word, ethos, meaning home, custom, morals, hence moral life’.23 Yet such a definition of ethics, close to the moderns’ conception of ethics as nearly synonymous with morality,24 would not be adapted to Woolf’s conversation since the English speakers are granted a vision of beauty totally devoid of moral connotations, unlike the Greeks who are said to fix ‘their minds upon the beautiful an the good’ (65). For Woolf, as for Fry and many of her contemporaries, art could not be measured by moral criteria.

  • 25 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

29What the very form of conversation, the bringing together of voices allows in fact, beyond generic hybridization and its blending of voices borrowed from drama with poetic elements, is debate. The talkers are brought together to voice their points of view and their disagreement. ‘Together and Apart’, as in Woolf’s short story of the same name, they can voice their dissent. Conversation thus appears to be an agonistic space, agon meaning both, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, dramatic representation and verbal fight,25 the ‘rivalry of free men’ (Lecercle 238). In other words, conversation is a democratic form, an ethical as well as an æsthetic space. The conventional form of the debate enables Woolf to include the ethical dimension within conversation, a form which she has otherwise totally remodeled. In the end, under the guise of telling a satirical story, Woolf tells the story of her own art in this short fiction, exposing her own literary choices, creating her own lexicon at the same time as her own theory. The choice of conversation as the locus of art may at first seem paradoxical for a writer who claims to be interested in inner life. Yet, because it is redefined as an ethical and æsthetic space encapsulating ‘the transversal dimension’ of the work of art together with the process of elimination, selection and saturation, conversation comes out as the very stuff Woolf’s fiction is made of.

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Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (1985; London: Triad Grafton Books, 1991).

2 S. P. Rosenbaum, ‘Virginia Woolf: “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus”’, TLS, September 11–17 1987, 979 and Charleston Newsletter 19 (September 1987): 23–32.

3 S. P. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury. The Early History of the Bloomsbury Group. Vol. 2 (London: MacMillan, 1994) 192.

4 Rosenbaum writes that ‘A Vision of Greece’ ‘begins with a map and goes on to speculate how disillusioning the place will be to the classically educated, with the monuments all ruined and the Greeks unable to understand their own classical language. At night, however, an image of ‘the great statue of the Maiden Goddess’ appears, as if to inspire the words of her lovers, Plato, Sophocles, Pericles. The vision lasts until the morning, when a farmer, after impiously cursing her, leaves a carrot on her altar because his priest had told him there is but one God. The shift here from disillusionment to the visionary and back to ordinary reality is a familiar pattern in Woolf’s later writing’ (Rosenbaum 1994, 182).

5 See Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).

6 T. S. Eliot will write in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘Poetry is not the turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’, Selected Essays (1932; London: Faber & Faber, 1951) 48.

7 ‘Greek literature is the impersonal literature’, Woolf writes in ‘On Not knowing Greek’ and goes on explaining that we know very little about Greek writers’ lives, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol.4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994) 39.

8 In A Room of One’s Own (1929; London: Granada, 1978) Woolf will add that art transcends sex: ‘it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly’ (99).

9 ‘It is Plato, of course, who reveals the life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up, fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth’ (‘On Not knowing Greek’, Essays 46).

10 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (London: Triad Grafton Books, 1978) November 28, 1928.

11 See in this volume Ariane Mildenberg’s article on this subject.

12 See also the image of the ‘ring of gold’ and the ‘golden chain’ running ‘through ages and races’ (68) and the following sentence: ‘Such a flame as that in the monk’s eye [. . .] had been lit once at the original hearth’ (68).

13 Eliot defines tradition in the following way: ‘It involves, in the first place, the historical sense [. . .] and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (40).

14 Claritas is quidditas [. . .] This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the moment is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance’. (Stephen Hero, 213, quoted by Maurice Beebe, ‘Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Æsthetics (1957)’ in James Joyce. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Morris Beja (London: Macmillan, 1973)166.

15 J. B. Bullen, introduction to Roger Fry, Vision and Design, (1920; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) XX.

16 See especially ‘An Essay in Æsthetics’ in Vision and Design.

17 Yet Bullen adds that Fry disagreed with Tolstoy when it came to measuring art by moral criteria.

18 Which the monk also symbolizes through his intensity and incandescence, the qualities of the artistic mind, according to Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

19 The transgression of the boundaries between human and non-human elements is also hinted at here in what Rosenbaum calls ‘a miraculous chain-of-being moment’ (Rosenbaum 1994, 192) when the light in the monk’s eyes ‘made the trees murmur and the air blow. And thousands of little creatures moved about in the grass’ (67).

20 ‘L’auteur dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part.’ Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 4 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–1998) Lettre à Louise Colet, 9 décembre 1852.

21 ‘La nouvelle convention linguistique, la structure formelle de l’œuvre, est donc la transversalité, qui traverse toute la phrase, qui va d’une phrase à une autre dans tout le livre, et qui même unit le livre de Proust à ceux qu’il aimait, Nerval, Chateaubriand, Balzac . . . Car si une œuvre d’art communique avec un public, bien plus le suscite, si elle communique avec les autres œuvres du même artiste, et les suscite, si elle communique avec d’autres œuvres d’autres artistes, et en suscite à venir, c’est toujours dans cette dimension de transversalité, où l’unité et la totalité s’établissent pour elles-mêmes, sans unifier ni totaliser objets ou sujets’ (Deleuze 201–02).

22 See Christiane Bimberg who writes about A Room of One’s Own: ‘A major characteristic of the essay is its emphasis on communication. ‘Communicate’ and ‘communication’ frequently recur to describe the intensive writer-reader rapport or even cooperation Woolf envisaged in good fiction.’ ‘The Poetics of Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.’ Connotations. A Journal for Critical Debate, 11 (2001/2002): 1, Münster/New York, 1–28.

23 Jean-Jacques Lecercle et Ronald Shusterman, L’Emprise des signes (Paris: Seuil, 2002) 235, my translation.

24 See Alain Badiou, L’Ethique (Paris: Hatier,1993) 4.

25 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

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Christine Reynier, « Conversation Redefined: Notes on ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’ »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 26 juillet 2024, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15131 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwt

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Christine Reynier

Christine Reynier is Professor of English literature at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier III, France. She has published extensively on Virginia Woolf, especially on her short fiction, and has edited journals and books on Woolf, namely Études britanniques contemporaines (October 1997; Autumn 1999) and Virginia Woolf. Le Pur et l’impur. Colloque de Cerisy 2001, eds. Catherine Bernard and Christine Reynier (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002). She is also interested in contemporary writers’ readings of Woolf and has just published Jeanette Winterson. Le miracle ordinaire (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2004).

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