- 1 In between 1908 and 1913, the Allied Artists Association (AAA) – an art exhibiting society based in (...)
1When the anonymous author of “Modernism at the Albert Hall” reviewed the cubist, post-impressionist and futurist works exhibited in London by the Allied Artists Association, he evoked “the immediate herald of a new Renaissance.”1 With this striking announcement and metaphor, he summoned up, perhaps unconsciously, a cyclical conception of history that involves a contradiction in terms. If, indeed, the notions of “renaissance and revolution imply return as much as they do advance,” as Michael North suggests in Novelty: A History of the New (North 2013, 36), then both the Renaissance and Modernist promise constant renewal while confessing that “even the idea of renewal is already old” (ibid., 41). The question, North suggests, is one of historiographical logic or ideology: “In merely empirical terms, the boasts of any period or movement to have effected ‘an absolute beginning’ are easily disproved, so that the breakpoint of the modern is pushed farther and farther back until the Renaissance becomes the ‘early modern’ and the stretch of temporal wasteland once known as the Dark Ages is revealed in its turn as a series of preparatory renewals” (ibid., 16).
- 2 On the myth of “ahistorical Modernism,” see Paul de Man’s definition, in Blindness and Insight, of (...)
- 3 I borrow the word “versioning” from Melba-Cuddy Keane’s article, “Virginia Woolf and the Varieties (...)
2North’s book reminds us of the “inevitable priority of the past over the pretensions of the present” (ibid., 17), a priority that was long denied, or undervalued, in Modernist scholarship.2 For at least three decades now, Modernist acts of “looking back” have become the focus of important scholarly work; yet this historiographical embrace remains a theoretical conundrum, whether we examine the links of Modernism with the nineteenth century, with the Enlightenment, or with the Renaissance, a period whose relationship with “novelty,” “change” and the “modern” is now being explored in its heterogeneity and complexity. In “Renaissance Theory: A Selective Introduction,” Rebecca Zorach writes: “From a distance, it sometimes seems that the Renaissance carries no other content than an assertion that change happens: the idea of the Renaissance often appears as a paradigm for historical change that can be mobilized to support the values (optimistic, pessimistic, or otherwise) any particular writer seeks to propound” (Zorach 2008, 5). For this reason, among others, the links between Modernism and the Renaissance were bound to be strong. In The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm, Francis McGrath explains: “As the Renaissance was the first flowering of a new vision of humanity in the arts, Modernism is the first artistic harvest of a new metaphysics with a revolutionary epistemology” (McGrath 1986, 9). From the Fin-de-siècle onwards, these links also happened to be multifaceted. When the Modernists reconfigured their relationship to their past and heritage, they did not retrieve the same territory, whether geographical or cultural. Walter Pater’s 1873 famous study of the Renaissance – “that movement in which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought” (Pater 1928, 54) – was to remain an inspiration for Modernist aesthetics for several decades; nonetheless, there is no such thing as a monolithic “Modernist Renaissance.” One should rather speak of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century groups and individuals offering different versionings of the Renaissance and its legacy.3
3In The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism, and Modernism, 1860–1920, Lynne Walhout Hinojosa gives a documented account of this legacy among the Victorians, the Edwardians and the Modernists. At the turn of the century, she reminds us, the “Renaissance” had become a period concept synonymous with the rebirth of a lost past and the possibility of continuous improvement. As a testimony to the linear and developmental models of historiography, it also helped English scholars, intellectuals and institutions to look for histories that would inspire a feeling of rebirth and national identity. Considered as the national equivalent of the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age was soon standardised as a period term that contributed to idealising England’s cultural and imperial past and to disvalue the earlier “Anglo-Saxon” era. In short, the new Renaissance scholars and artists often secularized the “Christian notions of time, history, and teleological fulfilment” and replaced them with “human or cultural constructs”; they also insisted that individual and intellectual freedom – in fact, that modernity as a whole – arose in Italy in the 14th century and one century later in the rest of Europe (Walhout Hinojosa 2009, 4). Between the 1880s and 1930s, several books still used the word “Renaissance” to describe contemporary life and culture. Among them: The Renaissance of English Drama: Essays, Lectures, and Fragments relating to the Modern English Stage Written and Delivered in the Years 1883-1894, by Henry Arthur Jones (1895); The Renaissance of the Nineties, by W. G. Blaikie Murdoch (1911), and Our Renaissance: Essays on the Reform and Revival of Classical Studies by Henry Browne (1917).
- 4 On this subject, see Blakeney-Williams 2002.
- 5 Michael North reminds us that “when Pound chooses “Make it New” as the title of his collection of e (...)
- 6 This is why Walhout Hinojosa concludes: “This double sense of historical movement – of seeing one’s (...)
4Many early twentieth-century artists, however, offered a critical vision of the “Renaissance” the legacy of which they considered to be individualism, capitalism, and a flawed vision of artistic progress.4 Thus, while Ezra Pound’s model of the new was clearly indebted to Jacob Burckhardt’s theory of the Renaissance,5 Bloomsbury artists like Roger Fry and Clive Bell denigrated Renaissance humanism and mimetic art; instead, they respectively advocated for the value of the Italian primitives or Byzantine art. In Elizabeth and Essex (1922), Lytton Strachey speaks of the “contradictions” of the age: the Elizabethans’ subtlety and “naïveté, their delicacy and their brutality, their piety and their lust”, he writes, “baffle our imagination and perplex our intelligence” (Strachey 1923, 8-9). A decade later, in “Introduction for My Plays,” Yeats writes: “I detest the Renaissance because it made the human mind inorganic; I adore [it] because it clarified form and created freedom” (Yeats 2001, 26). And yet, many Modernists shared with their Victorian predecessors the idea that the emergence of the individual as a subject and an artist found its origins during the Renaissance; some of them also borrowed from the Renaissance the idea that modernity implied a break with the immediate past and the return to an earlier period. Fry, for example, saw the postimpressionists as a newer version of the Italian Primitives while T. E. Hulme made analogies between modern art and primitive, non-Western art.6 As to the few literary historians of the period, they were energised by the worldwide celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s life in 1916; until the 1920s they continued to use Shakespeare’s legacy in order to institutionalise England’s cultural history.
- 7 In her essays and fictions, Woolf hardly ever uses the word Renaissance. One exception in “Notes fo (...)
- 8 On Woolf’s unacknowledged debt to Walter Pater, see Meisel 1980. Woolf, Meisel explains, bought Pat (...)
- 9 On this subject and Woolf’s historiographical method, see Besnault 2022.
- 10 See the entry of Woolf’s journal dated Thursday, September 12th: “Oh, blackberrying I conceived, or (...)
- 11 “History must be written all over again. It’s all morality – & battles, I added,” Woolf wrote in 19 (...)
- 12 Until the end, Woolf hesitated between two titles for her “common history book”: Reading at Random (...)
5Virginia Woolf was well aware of these debates. Her own Renaissance was English more than Italian,7 although we know that she had read Walter Pater, and that her silence on this important forefather cannot mask her debt to this fin-de-siècle essential figure.8 Unlike some of her contemporaries, Woolf never denigrated the Renaissance, nor did she see it as a period marked by a radical shift from obscurantism to the rebirth of a lost past accompanied by the new, “revolutionary epistemology” evoked by Francis McGrath. Along with the nineteenth century, the Renaissance was for Woolf a laboratory for her poetics of the “new” – not as a radical breaking point, but as as the result of a process of unwriting and rewriting “traditional” historiographical orthodoxies.9 In September 1940, however, when Woolf drafted the two first chapters of what was meant to be her own contribution to the history of literature in the form of a “Common History Book,”10 the Second World War was breaking past and present certainties while putting all ideas of renewal at bay. The necessity to “write history all over again”11 Woolf had felt throughout her career had become an urgent act of hope in the midst of despair. She was “reading the whole of English literature,” and “by the time [she had] reached Shakespeare,” she wrote to her friend Ethel Smyth, “the bombs [would] be falling” (Woolf 1980, 466). The difficulty to envision a transition from the present to the future was bound to find an interesting echo in the transition from the Middle-Ages to the Renaissance that was the subject of “Anon.”12
6Woolf’s relationship with her early-modern predecessors in the preceding two decades is now a well-established field of study. As Juliet Dusinberre argues, with the Renaissance Woolf “connected herself with a life which included her own rebirth as writer and reader through the recovery of female forebears”, and the period represented “a key aspect of her revolt against the nineteenth century” (Dusinberre 1997, 3). In Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (1990), Alice Fox provides a useful survey of Woolf’s references to Shakespeare; she also explores her admiration for the Tudor voyagers and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics, along with her feminist interest in Renaissance romance. Tracing Woolf’s footsteps “as a reader and reinterpreter of the canon of Renaissance literature as it was conceived in her time”, the essays in Sally Greene’s edited collection Virginia Woolf Reading the Renaissance show how, along with T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, Woolf “significantly reconceived” the period in the early twentieth century (Greene 1999, 2–3).
- 13 On the “ever-growing complexity and diversity of [Woolf’s] Renaissance,” see McWhirter 1999, 247.
- 14 When Woolf began to take notes for her “Common History book,” she was in the process of finishing B (...)
- 15 In “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” Woolf calls them “the lesser Elizabethans” (Woolf 1994, 62).
- 16 Woolf saw Montaigne as “the first of the moderns” (“The Decay of Essay Writing,” Woolf 1986, 25), h (...)
7Strikingly, though, Woolf’s English “Renaissance” did not try to recapture a cultural wholeness and unity. Like her vision of the Victorians, her conception of the period cannot be easily homogenized.13 In The Voyage Out (1915), the present bears the indelible traces of Elizabethan sailors, colonists and voyagers. Conversely, in Orlando the narrator biographer considers the Elizabethan age as a radically different era: “The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different” (Woolf 1992c, 26). In Jacob’s Room, both the “Italian painters of the Renaissance” and “all the Elizabethans” are on the shelves of the eponymous hero’s room in Cambridge – the expected classics in a young student’s formation (Woolf 1992b, 49). In Orlando: A Biography (1928), Woolf brings back with her protagonist, born in Elizabethan times, her admiration for the age, its verse, drama and best writers. In A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on the “Elizabethan woman” and on how “history scarcely mentions her” due to the “scarcity of facts”. She also imagines the fictional character of Shakespeare’s sister, the “gifted,” “adventurous” and “imaginative” Judith who, had she existed, would undoubtedly have killed herself for not being able to practice her art (Woolf 2000, 34; 36). In Between the Acts, her play-novel placed on the threshold between peace and war, between the present moment and the cultural past of Britain, the country pageant mounted by Miss La Trobe captures the audience’s attention when Queen Elizabeth suddenly appears, “the Elizabethan age personified” (Woolf 1992a, 84-85), “then descend[s] from her soap box,” dies and is carried away – a tribute to Elizabethan masques and anti-masques.14 As to the Renaissance authors Woolf mentions in her essays, they are sometimes part of the canon – Spenser, Sidney, the Elizabethan playwrights, Hakluyt, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson. Most of the time, however, her corpus of references includes more “obscure” writers such as Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher”;15 chroniclers and diarists like Sir Thomas Browne, “[t]he first of the autobiographers” (“Notes on an Elizabethan Play” Woolf 1994, 59); marginal figures such as Philip Henslowe, the owner and manager of a playhouse in Southwark; the “obscure” Elizabeth Hardwick, Anne and Mary Fytton, or Lady Anne Clifford. Last but not least, there is Woolf’s well-known affinity with late Renaissance authors and Montaigne in particular.16
- 17 See Woolf 2011a. All quotations from the essay will refer to this volume which also includes “The R (...)
8Woolf goes beyond the insufficiency of the sources at her disposal to convey a conception of the period that partakes both of myth and factuality. The elasticity of her “Renaissance” implies variations in terms of dates – it can find its centre in the reign of the Virgin Queen or in later early-modern figures – and of literary traditions. With Perry Meisel, one might argue that her Renaissance is inspired by Walter Pater’s definition of the Renaissance as “that movement in which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought” (Pater 1928, 54). She read Shakespeare, Spencer, Sidney and the Voyages of Hakluyt with the same curiosity as the years went by, and often from a feminist perspective. Before 1940, however, Woolf had not imagined a critical book that would go through English literature from the age of “Anon”, the anonymous poet, to her own age in a continuum. While “Anon” takes us from the Anglo-Saxons to the Elizabethan age, “The Reader” is the story of how “the reader comes into existence some time at the end of the sixteenth century” (Woolf 2011b, 600). It is with Anon, the anonymous and unprinted author “[breaking] the silence of the forest” before the Age of Chaucer, that English culture was born, Woolf explains in “Anon” (Woolf 2011a, 581).17 It is Anon, she will show, that the printing press killed, and with him the very figure who represents the communal and democratic ethos that Woolf was looking for at the end of her life.
- 18 See Virginia Woolf’s diary entry of 12 September 1940: “If we can hold out this week – next week – (...)
- 19 See V. Woolf, “Notes for Reading at Random” (Woolf 1979, 373).
- 20 G. M. Trevelyan was among the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation (...)
- 21 Because in her drafted essay Woolf keeps using the masculine pronoun “he” to refer to Anon, I will (...)
- 22 On the way Woolf’s portrait of Anon “enlarges” the portrait of Miss La Trobe, see Silver 1979, 380- (...)
9When she edited Woolf’s two drafted essays in 1979, Brenda Silver provided elements of context which have since helped scholars and readers understand the external and internal circumstances that led to the conception of Woolf’s unfinished “Common History Book.”18 Woolf wanted her history book “to begin with English country before Eth,” to evoke “the effect of country upon writers” and to always relate her subject to both time and geography19: “Anon” thus starts with a quotation from G. M. Trevelyan’s 1926 History of England that pictures Britain as “an island” where, once upon a time, “the untamed forest was king” and Anon began to sing (2011a, 581).20 And when his or her song emerges from the silence – “Anon is sometimes man; sometimes woman” (ibid., 582)21 – we cannot but remember the voice of Miss La Trobe in Woolf’s play-novel,22 and of Woolf herself as she feared the possibility of her audience’s disappearance in a letter to Elizabeth Robins dated March 13, 1941: “It’s difficult, I find, to write. No audience. No private stimulus, only this outer roar” (Woolf 1980, 479).
- 23 Jules Michelet, Renaissance et Reforme. Histoire de France au XVI siècle 1855-1856 : « L’art et la (...)
10Anon’s song, Woolf tells us, came out of a different silence, “the silence of the forest” before the existence of “human voice” (Woolf 2011a, 581). As such, the song announces the beginning of what Woolf appears to see as a golden age: before “self-consciousness […] raised its mirror,” before “the author’s name is attached to the book” and “the individual emerges” (ibid., 584-585). At first sight, therefore, Woolf disagrees with Jules Michelet, one of her favourite historians, when he wrote: “Art and reason reconciled, here is the Renaissance, the marriage of the beautiful and the true.”23 In “Anon,” the “obscure” thinkers and artists that Woolf had spent her career trying to reclaim are not the Elizabethans, but the anonymous poets and minstrels of the previous period who used to animate the culture of commoners: the Elizabethan age is less about “marriage” and concord than about the end of unity and union. Her drafted essay begins with “the country […]. The eye of the youthful sense. Our floods. This brings back the wildness. Out of doors. Indoors. Study no library” (Woolf 1979, 373). But after a three-page-long evocation of the anonymous poet’s resounding voice in Britain’s untamed landscapes before Chaucer, Woolf’s historical narrative interrupts the almost idyllic reconstitution of Anon’s journeys as an “outsider” from one commoner’s house to another’s with a blunt statement and a symbolic murder: “It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon” (Woolf 2011a, 583).
11As abruptly as the rupture so often associated with the advent of Modernism, a new cultural age begins. The very invention that had enabled private reading outside the authority of the Church and of Kings and that Woolf and her husband had used, many centuries later, to bring modern texts to a large audience, is here the technological instrument that puts an end to a cultural world that had never “fixed” the voice of the poet before. In “Anon,” the idea of a “renewal” to come is clearly not located where one could have expected it to be.
- 24 Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction”: “And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more di (...)
12Echoing her statement, in 1924, that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,”24 Woolf’s description of the sudden ending of an age (before the Elizabethans) is nonetheless qualified. First, because this moment is grounded in a paradox: if the printing press killed the anonymous poet, it also “preserved him” by fixing his voice forever (Woolf 2011a, 583). Then, because with their “strange mixture of fact & fable,” Thomas Malory’s pages, Woolf explains, let us “hear the voice of Anon murmuring still.” Le Morte D Arthur thus constitutes a transitional work before “Caxton’s printing press fore[tells] the end of that anonymous world” and brings “the past into existence,” along with “the man who is conscious of the past; the man who first sees himself and shows himself to us” (ibid., 583-584). When this gradual ascendancy of authorship takes place, the second part of a history marked by blurry transitions and the absence of specific dates has begun.
- 25 The word “change” is used by Woolf four times.
13Out of an inchoate whole, the figure of the writer emerges. “His name is Holinshed; his name is also Harrison” (ibid., 584-585). With these first Renaissance chroniclers, the present is seen “against the settled recorded past” without any ambiguity; it is compared with the preceding periods and judged accordingly since the focus has now become “change” (ibid., 585).25 Because the Renaissance man “turns away from the present” towards the Greeks and the Romans (ibid., 585), Anon disappears in the recesses of a “barbarous” background with no “intellectual pedigree”: his songs are ignored, and so are the commoners who used to listen to him. To the separation between a close, uncivilised past and the promise of a new classical recovery, Woolf adds the division between the man of letters and the anonymous poet; between the “back door,” where the latter still presents himself to sing, and “upstairs” where another language is spoken: French or Latin, she presumes, rather than old English. As she describes these transformations, Woolf remains aware of the material circumstances of both the common people – the audience whose transformation she will continue to keep track of – and the Renaissance scholars and nobles who read, write and translate.
- 26 Strikingly, Woolf never uses the word “humanist” in this essay; nor does she mention the martyrdom (...)
14However, the killing of Anon by the printing press implies new births, or “existence[s]” (ibid., 584): the birth of historical consciousness – since the past can now be recorded and fixed – and of artistic awareness. Among these new artists or intellectuals with a name, Woolf chooses to evoke Anon’s spiritual followers: those who, like Hugh Latimer and William Harrison, continue to travel from village to village, to knock on locked doors and to address the needs and desires of a popular audience. It is for these commoners that Latimer decides to abandon his “learned” and “courtly” voice in order to speak as a “man of flesh and blood” denouncing the “luxury” and “immorality” of the “great house rising on the ruins of [the] old” (ibid., 587).26 Thanks to him, one will remember this past even in the midst of the reign to come – a reign characterised by the ascendency of the Great Elizabethan House with its sumptuous display of furniture, tapestries and clothes.
- 27 On the comfort and magnificence of the Elizabethan “Great House”, built in the country for the weal (...)
15Without any typographical or logical breaking point preceding the mention of her name, Queen Elizabeth appears in the middle of a paragraph that pays tribute to the now dead chronicler and preacher. Interestingly, Woolf’s unceremonious transition to the Elizabethan age recalls her rewriting of Thomas Dekker’s account of the Great Frost in Orlando’s first chapter, when she ironically juxtaposed scenes of starvation, terror and petrification with the evocation of James I’s brilliant pageant on the Thames (Woolf 1992c, 32–33). In “Anon”, the first contrast on which Woolf insists is not between the Middle-Ages and the Elizabethan age, but between the poor and the rich, the voices of the past at the “backdoor” and the voices of the present, speaking at court or in Renaissance manor houses.27 Woolf’s depiction of the period unfolds with a combination of questions, quotations, and names; she combines references to material culture, social history and literary history while relying on multiple sources: diaries, biographies, previous histories and chronicles, quotations, literary texts. In turn, Lady Bacon, Francis Bacon, Lady Anne Clifford, Samuel Pepys, Edmund Spenser, Philip Henslowe, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes or Robert Burton testify to a new abundance of voices, literary genres and styles. And yet, Woolf states abruptly: “The Elizabethans are silent” (Woolf 2011a, 588). This new silence obviously differs from Anon’s silence at the beginning of the essay, although Woolf draws a parallel between the common people’s “desire to sing” before the time of Chaucer (ibid., 581) and the Elizabethans’ own desire to “speak” through art and fashion (ibid., 588). Woolf’s fundamental question, the reader now understands clearly, is literature’s capacity to create a cultural identity accessible to all, to transform “commonness into communality” (Gualtieri 2000, 46) and speak “our own thoughts.” This value, she argues, depends both on external circumstances and on more subjective, individual appropriations of language and literary codes: Shakespeare, for example, was able to “absorb […] the contribution of the audience” while returning to them “their own general life individualised” (Woolf 2011a, 599).
- 28 “Try to write lit the other way round,” Woolf writes in “Notes for reading at Random,” “define the (...)
16To explore the modes of production, consumption and reception of the literary text – what she calls “influences”28 – Woolf goes on weaving two major thematic threads caught in the skein of facts and metaphor. The first of these threads concerns the changes in the material culture of the period: its objective correlative are the manmade structures designed for people to live in or to share an artistic experience. Anon sang “at the back door” and was “despised” if “tolerated” by the “master and mistress”; but the house he could not enter was a place of “natural connection” and commonality (ibid., 588). Although much more refined, the great Elizabethan house is isolated and silent; the poet stands on its threshold, metaphorically this time, especially when, like Spenser, he is a court poet: although he may want to recapture Anon’s and Chaucer’s voices, he also needs to imagine how to entertain the Queen and the nobles. Meanwhile, the “wandering minstrels, driven from the Church” manage to “possess themselves” of a different type of house in Southwark. Bridging the distance and symbolic gap between “town and country”, new audiences come to this new place “in defiance of preachers & magistrates.” They are the common people who crowd into “part open to the air, part thatched” playhouses such as The Rose, the architectural openness of these theatres being an echo to other forms of overtness and publicness (ibid., 592). Although the Elizabethan playhouse is inimical to the expression of the private language and “single subtlety” of “one soul,” it resounds with “wandering,” “collected,” “embodied” voices (ibid., 593): the play performed on its stage “is still in part the work of an undifferentiated audience” partaking in its elaboration (ibid., 594).
- 29 In “Anon,” Woolf uses the word “voice” twenty-nine times and the words “silence” or “silent” thirte (...)
17And yet, Woolf calls this audience “silent”: we know nothing, she suggests, of the Elizabethans’ private lives off stage, especially when they are women: their passions, secrets, sorrows and frequent disgrace are “hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence” (ibid., 595). Like the dramatists, the majority of the commoners who gather in a playhouse remain anonymous and therefore silent. As individuals, they have not been given a voice; as readers or spectators they are confronted to new artistic forms that rely neither on the Bible nor on the old chronicles. With no instrument of comparison or assessment, they lack the words of literary appraisal. By the end of “Anon,” it thus becomes clear that the successive stages of Woolf’s literary history also follow the meanders of this second thematic thread in the form of a sustained metaphoric contrast between speaking voices and silences.29 While the “silences” she explores shed light on what is inaccessible or inexistent – the printed word before Caxton; the familiar, colloquial speech of the Elizabethans’ predecessors; all the “passions” of the body (ibid., 591), to take a few examples – the “voices” that she successively evokes take the form of the mummers’ and minstrels’ spoken words (ibid., 588); of the Elizabethan poet’s written lines addressed a more literate public; then of the actors’ audible speeches on the Elizabethan stages. Every time, the interplay of voices and silences that Woolf uncovers “speaks” of how all fresh configurations of subjectivity are conditioned by the artist’s individual practice, self-awareness, desire for recognition and various “attachments.” To have a name “attached to one’s book” is, indeed, to be “attached” to the external influences that one’s audience implies. In the forests of prehistoric Britain, the desire to sing and create came from the awareness of birdsong: Anon, then, “was not self-conscious” (ibid., 589-590). With the printed word, the poet became aware of his past, of his linguistic medium, of himself as an artist with a name, a heritage, a reputation. At the end of Woolf’s drafted essay, when Anon and anonymity withdraw, the motifs of her “Common History Book” have “f[ound] the end of a ball of string and wind out” (“Notes for Reading at Random,” Woolf 1979, 373).
- 30 The expression “first principles” was coined in the context of this debate by English poet and crit (...)
- 31 “[S]kip present day,” Woolf noted in the outline of her Common History Book (“A chapter on the futu (...)
- 32 On the way the humanist defense of female learning intersected with debates on the worth of women a (...)
18To follow Woolf’s woven thematic threads in “Anon” is therefore to read a history that is both linear (although the text’s fuzzy chronology does not rely on the traditional historiographical trope of “progress, decline and fall”) and cyclical when the narrative relies on Renaissance pattern of seasonal deaths and births, of cyclical loss and gain. Thus, when Elizabethan drama is “replaced by the theatre of the brain,” the “playwright is replaced by the man who writes a book. The audience is replaced by the reader. Anon is dead” (Woolf 2011a, 599). Meanwhile, the sequential organisation of the essay enables Woolf to keep track of “the continuity of tradition” (“Notes for Reading at Random,” Woolf 1979, 373) and to shed light on two distinct moments of literary history: the age, before Chaucer’s time, when no cultural heritage could be fixed by the written word; and the Renaissance, when the layers of a remembered legacy could take shape. In “Anon,” therefore, “novelty” depends on what François Hartog calls a “regime of historicity”: the self-conscious way of “linking together past, present and future or of mixing these categories” (Hartog 2015, xv). As to the notion of “absolute beginning” (North 2013, 16), Woolf implicitly invalidates it, since no “origins” can be established by human memory before the advent of the printing press. In this respect, Woolf appears to refute two frequent conceptions of literary history at the turn of the century: the “Teutonic School” of literary historians who still promoted Anglo-Saxon origins, and the defenders of the idea that the Elizabethans embodied the very “first principle” of English language and literature.30 Indeed, Woolf’s Renaissance in “Anon” is not the period found in the text-books of her time; nor is it the beginning of a new humanist curriculum. It does not explore, in laudatory terms, the elevation of an age; nor does it demote the earlier Anglo-Saxon era. What needs to be recovered or explored anew, here, are not the classics, or the shift between feudalism to capitalism, but a utopian dream of cultural commonality. While Woolf’s tone in “Anon” has strong nostalgic accents, the painful impossibility to return to a lost past nonetheless coexists with the essayist’s unique way of bringing this past to the present in order to prepare for the future beyond its tragic potentialities.31 What Woolf chooses to revive in “Anon” is the history of anonymity and the vernacular, and with it the marriage between the oral and the written word before and after Chaucer’s age. As such, the “beginning” she chooses does not have a clear “origin” or precise departing point. It does not engender any of the central concepts of male humanism such as national and imperial culture, the unified self or the heroic individual epic.32 On the contrary, the essay insists on the diffusion of a vernacular oral culture that was never appropriated and monopolised by the Church or the universities. Before artists and their songs were labelled and categorised, before the demarcation between the voice of nature and Anon’s voice, Woolf unveils a world that has disappeared but whose values western civilisation sorely needed in the 1940s.
19In the end, “Anon” is less a “historical fantasy” as McWhirter suggests than a counter-history which unwrites and rewrites previous historiographical discourses concerning the Renaissance and what came before (McWhirter 1999, 260). At first sight, the birth and the death of Anon seem to read as tribute to what David Perkins describes, in Is Literary History Possible?, as a “readable and popular, yet informed and intelligent” nineteenth-century model of literary history with its “omissions and emphases,” its “structure of cause and effect,” its heroic plot resorting to “metaphors of origins, emergence from obscurity, neglect and recognition” (Perkins 1992, 29-33). By using the linear covering of more than one period of English literary history – from the Anglo-Saxons to the Renaissance and after – Woolf can also appear to re-establish the prestige of national teleological narratives. However, Anon is no “hero” here; nor is Shakespeare or any other prestigious Elizabethan figure. The essay does not rely on a chronology shaped by dates and clear-cut periods. Although linear, Woolf’s conception of time is a layered reservoir of individual and collective gestures, quotations and stories, official and unofficial forms of knowledge. She focuses on the multiple forces and influences that helped found a culture, whether dominant or marginal. Her “Common History Book” includes what was long neglected: the role of anonymity in holding together a community and the essential role of reception in a writer’s artistic practice. As all Renaissance historians, she chooses a breaking point that involves technology and those who master it, among whom the famous Caxton. But she rewrites this breaking point by changing the traditional contents of the “rebirth” trope inherent to the Renaissance. Indeed, Woolf’s Renaissance is not a new version of the same, nor is it a recombination of the old. It is a mythological and political genesis recounting how the advent of the written word is a story of differentiation – “the individual on the [Elizabethan] stage becomes more and more differentiated” (“Anon” Woolf 2011a, 598) – and individuation, whether of authors, characters and future readers – that sheds light on the artists who kept the community fire burning. If there is something radically new in this singular vision of the period, there is also something resolutely eternal and humanistic here: the historiographer’s attempt to retrieve the traces of a past that enlightens our present and our future, and the artist’s struggle to speak in a voice that does not silence other voices.