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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

In Search of Lost Time

February 11, 2010 by Roy Johnson

characters, resources, video, translations

There’s no doubt about it: if you’re going to tackle In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past as it is also known) you need to be in good intellectual shape. The sentences are long, the paragraphs are huge, and at a million and a half words his great novel is one of the longest ever.

But it can be done – and the benefits are enormous. Proust delivers gems on every page. He is of course celebrated for his psychological insights. His characters live and breathe in a way which makes you feel they become your personal friends. Don’t expect plot, suspense, or even story in a conventional sense. This modern classic is one of characters circling around each other in a way which depicts an entire world of upper-class fin de circle France before and shortly after the First World War.

However, the greatest depths he offers are in the form of profound reflections on some of the most important issues any novelist can approach – love, desire, memory, time, and death. These are written in the form of extended aphorisms, embedded as part of his narrative in such a way that you will hardly be aware where one ends and the other begins.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Marcel Proust – portrait by Jaques Emil Blanche

Study resources

In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time – 6 volume boxed set (Modern Library) – US

In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – UK

In Search of Lost Time – 4 volume boxed set (Everyman’s Library) – US

Proust: an illustrated life – short biography with period photos

Proust’s life and works – a detailed chronology

A Reader’s Guide to Proust – Amazon UK

Proust Website – general resources

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – web site with videos

Reading Proust – various translations compared

Swann’s Way – an essay on translations

Swann in Love – 1984 DVD adaptation in English – Amazon UK

Time Regained – 1999 DVD adaptation (English subtitles) – Amazon UK

Monsieur Proust – the housekeeper’s memoirs – Amazon UK

Marcel Proust at Wikipedia – biographical notes, web links

Marcel Proust at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Proust in the original French

A la recherche du temps perdu – 10 volumes, illustrated (Kindle) pp.2911 – £2.22 – Amazon UK

Oeuvres complètes de Marcel Proust – Illustrated, with biography and criticisim (Kindle) pp.4100 – £1.32 – Amazon UK

Principal characters

Marcel	the outer narrator of the novel
Bathilde Amedee	the narrator’s grandmother
Francoise	the narrator’s faithful maid
Baron de Charlus	an aristocratic dandy and gay aesthete
Duchesse de Guermantes	the toast of Parisian high society
Robert de Saint-Loup	army officer and narrator’s best friend
Charles Swann	a friend of the narrator’s family
Odette de Crecy	a beautiful Parisian courtesan
Gilberte Swann	the daughter of Swann and Odette
Elstir	a famous painter
Bergotte	a well-known writer
Vinteuil	an obscure but talented musician
Berma	a famous actress
Charles Morel	a gifted violinist, patronised by Charlus
Albertine Simonet	an orphan with whom the narrator has a romance
Madame Verdurin	a rapacious social-climber

In Search of Lost Time – film adaptation

Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich

Proust’s writing – I

Mont Blanc – Marcel Proust special edition

Don’t let this glamorous fountain pen deceive you. Marcel Proust’s writing instruments and his notebooks were quite humble. He used Sergent-Major nibs and pen holder which were the cheapest of their kind. For paper, he used the common French school children’s exercise notebooks which he purchased in bulk.

Parisian interior – La belle epoque

Proust’s writing – II

Revisions to a typescript

Proust’s method of composition was highly accretive. He wrote primarily in children’s exercise books, but his first drafts were supplemented by countless additions, revisions, and extensions of thought which he scribbled down on any paper which came to hand.

Envelopes, magazine covers, scraps of paper of different length and format were glued into the exercise books or joined together to form long scrolls sometimes two metres long.

This process also continued when proofs of his manuscript came back from the printer. This was a habit very similar to that of his illustrious predecessor Balzac. As Terrence Kilmartin observes:

The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips – what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s paperoles. The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.

In Search of Lost Time – editions

Click the jacket covers for further details at Amazon UK

Which translation should you read? In English there are three options currently in print. My favourite is the oldest by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. It was the first to appear as the original volumes were published, and it even had Proust’s own blessing. Although it is based on a version of the French original which was not complete, it has a charm all of its own. It is this version which gave the novel its alternative title Remembrance of Things Past when Scott Moncrieff chose a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, rather than a literal translation of the original:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past

The jacket cover illustrated here is that of the old Chatto and Windus edition which was presented in twelve volumes. Snap these up if you see them, but in the meantime this translation is available from Penguin books.

The second option is an edition which is based on the Scott Moncrieff original translation, but which was revised and re-translated by Terrence Kilmartin in the 1990s. This version is also informed by updated versions of the original text in French, including new material which has come to light since the author’s death. Kilmartin’s work was then itself edited by D.J.Enright

So this version comes to us with a guarantee of completeness and accuracy, but with the traces of three different translators’ hands since the original work. Each volume contains its own notes, addenda, and a synopsis, so readers new to Proust can feel supported by this additional material. [It’s available as a boxed set which is also known slightly mischievously as the ‘Proust 6-pack’.]

There’s also a more recent version produced by seven different translators. This has the advantage of being the most up to date. It is based on the latest version of a text with a very tangled provenance, and each translator writes a preface on the problems of translation. This version got a mixed reception when it first appeared. Some people argue that it removes a certain prissiness which had clung to the English version of Proust since Scott Moncrieff’s translation. Others have claimed that it introduces new problems and lacks a unifying voice. Perhaps the best reason for choosing it is that it’s now generally available at a cut-down price.

The Cambridge Companion to Proust provides essays on the major features of Marcel Proust’s great work. These investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is couched, its intellectual parameters, its humour, its analytical profundity and its wide appeal and influence. This is suitable for those who want to study Proust in depth. The discussion is illustrated by textual quotation (in both French and English) and close analysis. This is the only volume of its kind on Proust currently available. It contains a detailed chronology and bibliography.

Marcel Proust is an excellent biography by George Painter. This study has become famous in its own right, because it combines deep insights with scholarly rigour – and it is also written in a very stylish manner. Painter sketches in the background to Parisian society, which provides a historical context for what follows. He then traces Proust’s singular life (the neurasthenia, the ‘job’ he kept for one day, the cork-lined bedroom) up to his death in 1922 – where he was still revising his masterpiece in bed, which is where he had written most of it. This is regarded as a classic of modern biography, and in 1965 it was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.

AND … now for something completely different

Other works by Marcel Proust

Jean Santeuil
This was Proust’s ‘dry run’ for his major work. It’s an unfinished (though quite long) fragment of a novel about the life of a young Parisian man which tells the story of boyhood summers of strawberries and cream cheese, of garlands of pink blossom under branches of white may, of love and its lies, of political scandal and of his deep feeling for his parents.

The Pleasures and the Days
Set amid fin-de-siecle Parisian salon society, these sketches and short stories depict the lives, loves, manners and motivations of a host of characters, all viewed with a characteristically knowing eye. By turns cuttingly satirical and bitterly moving, Proust’s portrayals are layered with imagery and feeling, whether they be of the aspiring Bouvard and Pecuchet, the deluded Madame de Breyves, or Baldassare Silvande, saturated with regret, memory and final understanding at the end of his life.

Contre Saint Beuve
This series of essays has as its centrepiece Proust’s literary manifesto. In it he argues for an essentially modernist position – that works of art should be considered autonomously, rather than objects which we use as a means of exploring the author’s biography.

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

More on Marcel Proust
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

In the Cage

April 30, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

In the Cage first appeared in book form in both England and America in 1898. It was later revised and included in the complete New York edition of James’s work in 1909. The tale is quite unusual in James’s oeuvre in that it takes its subject matter from the daily life of a working-class woman. The milieu is also novel, because the events of the narrative are set in one corner of a grocer’s shop – albeit located in Mayfair.

In the Cage – critical commentary

Story? Novella? Novel?

At almost thirty-three thousand words, In the Cage is too long to be classed as a short story. It strays beyond the limits of this genre both in terms of length and subject matter. Of course James never claimed that any of his shorter fictions were short stories in the sense that this term is now used. The collective title he used for his shorter works was Tales – which turned out to be very well chosen, since this term does not carry any fixed expectations in terms of form or content.

The issue of categorisation depends very much on the interpretation given to the content of the piece. If it is regarded as an innocent and brief interlude during the summer months of a young woman’s life, it would be quite legitimate to classify it as a long short-story. She indulges in an imaginative romance, but then settles for a safe if predictable marriage.

But if the issues of modern telegraphy, transmitting messages, the different expectations and behaviour between working and liesured classes, and the educative process of the young woman’s lesson in realism are taken into account – a case could be made for it being a short novel. These are large enough issues to warrant classification in the heavier and more serious genre.

However, in even a short novel we would normally expect a more even-handed and fully rounded account of the principal characters. In the Cage provides characterisation for only the young woman, her friend Mrs Jordan, and her fiancé Mr Mudge. We really know very little about Captain Everard and almost nothing about Lady Bradeen except through the imagination of the young woman or the social gossip of Mrs Jordan. This is not the substance we expect of the realist novel, no matter how foreshortened.

That leaves the possibility of classifying the work as a novella. The tale certainly has a number of the ingredients we expect to find in the genre that James particularly admired – what he called “the beautiful and blessed nouvelle“. . Novellas are like simplified and densely compressed novels, with few characters and an intensely concentrated subject which usually has universal significance.

Narrative interest in this tale is focussed on the educative experience of one character – the young woman telegraphist. The location (apart from one brief holiday excursion) is largely her commercial environment in Mayfair and the pressure she is under from social conditions at work and home. Her professional skills working with contemporary technology are a fitting symbol for communications between the classes which form the backbone to the narrative. And it could be argued that her final decision to realistically accept her fate as the wife-to-be of a grocer is a universal theme.

On all these grounds In the Cage qualifies as a novella. But there are some problems with this interpretation which fits the tale to this genre.

Problems

Foremost is the issue of inevitability. The novella (and even the novel) does require a certain degree of persuadable, logical, inevitable outcome from the premises it has laid forward. It also has to be said that most novellas have a very serious, and often a tragic outcome: one thinks of classics in the genre, such as Benito Cereno, Death in Venice, and even James’s own The Turn of the Screw, which was written in the same year.

The problem with In the Cage is that the young lady, for the majority of the narrative, is a hopelessly romantic fantasist – imputing all sorts of characteristics and motives to her customers without any supporting intelligence. James deliberately satirises this attitude, as he does the comparable snobbery and pretention of Mrs Jordan. What he does not really supply is sufficient evidence for her change of heart when she decides to settle for marriage to Mr Mudge.

Quite apart from his semi-comic name, Mr Mudge has been characterised throughout the tale as a well-intentioned man but a monumental bore of Dickensian proportions. He represents a realistic marriage prospect for a young woman of the telegraphist’s position in society – but since we have been made aware of his shortcomings largely from her point of view throughout the narrative, her conversion to accepting him at its end doesn’t seem altogether persuasive. Neither is such a resolution the substance of the novella, which normally deals in serious issues. The future for Mr and Mrs Mudge in Chalk Farm is nothing more than the prospect of a life of unremitting Pooterism, The Diary of a Nobody having been published only a few years earlier in 1888). This sort of bathetic outcome is not normally the substance of a novella.

On these grounds, it might be safer to simply leave In the Cage categorised as the completely amorphous Tale, a long story of sorts (which is more or less the same thing), or a very short novel. It is interesting to note that it is placed in all these categories by members of the book trade such as Amazon and AbeBooks.

In the Cage – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 18—18 – Library of America – Amazon US

In the Cage – Kindle edition

In the Cage – eBook versions at Gutenberg

In the Cage – audioBook versions at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

In the Cage – plot summary

Part I. An un-named young woman works as a telegraphist in the post office within a grocer’s store in Mayfair. She has become engaged (without much enthusiasm) to Mr Mudge, a grocer, and she lives in rather poor circumstances with her mother and her elder sister.

Part II. Her fiancé wants her to move to an ‘outer suburb’ (Chalk Farm) so as to be nearer to him, and to save money. But she prefers to stay in Mayfair, the social life of which gives her scope for her imagination.

Part III. She despatches telegrams and cryptic messages, and she fantasises about the lives of her customers – particularly a ‘handsome lady’ who might be called Mary or Cissie.

Part IV. She interprets the lives of her customers from the contents of their telegrams – particularly a man who comes in with the handsome lady, who she assumes to be the ‘Everard’ mentioned in some messages.

Part V. She is very conscious of class differences and the profligate way her (largely upper-class) customers spend their money (judging by the length of their messages – which are priced per word). She feels powerful in knowing people’s secrets and she generalizes that her women customers are on the whole in pursuit of her men.

Part VI. Her friend Mrs Jordan invites her to join her flower-arranging enterprise, which she enjoys because it brings her into contact with upper class society.

Part VII. She is tempted by the idea, because she wants to meet people from the upper class. Mrs Jordan claims to be on intimate terms with her clients, but it is clear that she is exaggerating any such connections.

Part VIII. The two women begin to compete over who has the closer connections with fashionable society. The young woman also begins to have doubts about her engagement to Mr Mudge.

Part IX. She has mixed feelings about Mr Mudge, who is boring and predictable, yet she respects his simplicity and honesty. She can see his limitations, and she aspires to ‘greater’ (more romantic) things.

Part X. She tells Mr Mudge that she is appalled by the rich people who are her customers, but it is clear that she feels a snobbish pleasure at ‘mixing’ with upper class society. He too is attracted to the idea of rubbing shoulders with the well-to-do.

Part XI. Meanwhile,, she continues to inflate the significance of her (non) ‘relationship’ with Captain Everard. She invents excuses for querying his written notes, but sees them as having been planted there deliberately for that purpose.

Part XII. She imagines that Captain Everard would like to share his problems with her and confide in her about his love affairs. She goes to the building at Park Chambers where he lives and fantasises about meeting him.

Part XIII. The handsome lady returns, and she helps her to correct a mistake in her telegram, which reveals her knowledge of the lady’s affairs.

Part XIV. When the summer arrives Mr Mudge wants to plan a holiday together. She is bored by the excessive details of his preparation, and starts walking past Park Chambers every night. On one occasion she does meet him there.

Part XV. They walk into Hyde Park and sit on a bench together, talking. He reveals that he knows she has been taking a ‘special interest’ in him, which makes her cry.

Part XVI. Thinking that she is unlikely to meet him again, she tells him the whole truth of the interest she has taken in him, but that she will be leaving to work elsewhere. He asks her to stay and ‘help’ him.

Part XVII. She admits to him that she enjoys knowing about people’s private lives and says she will do anything for hi. He implores with her to stay working in the post office, and she leaves him saying that she will never give him up.

Part XVIII. She goes on holiday to Bournemouth with her mother and Mr Mudge, where he is more boring than ever, but she retreats from him into a private world of the imagination. However, he announces that having been given a rise at work, he is now ready to marry.

Part XIX. She relates her recent experiences in the Park with Captain Everard to Mr Mudge, and explains how she wants to protect him from danger. She also wants Mr Mudge to wait longer before they marry – at which Mudge is (understandably) miffed.

Part XX. Some weeks later Captain Everard returns to the post office. She feels that something is wrong, and possibly reaching a dramatic climax. Everard lingers in the shop, but they do not get a chance to speak to each other.

Part XXI. The same thing happens again later. She persuades herself that Everard is somehow trying to help her. She also interprets all his telegrams as signs of danger of some kind.

Part XXII. She thinks her services as Everard’s protector will come to an end, and she will be obliged to accept Mr Mudge. However, the very next day Everard arrives with an urgent telegram. Next day he comes back again saying he wants to recover a telegram sent some time ago.

Part XXIII. She procrastinates in trying to locate the telegram for him, but in the end supplies the information he needs. She has memorised it, because of her interest in his correspondence.

Part XXIV. During the late summer low season Mrs Jordan continues to boast about her connections with high society. She invites the young woman back to her humble rooms in Maida Vale. She is engaged to marry Mr Drake.

Part XXV. Mrs Jordan reveals that Mr Drake is due to be engaged (as a butler) by Lady Bradeen – who is a correspondent of Captain Everard’s via his telegrams. Lady Bradeen is due to marry Captain Everard, following quickly on the death of her husband. The two women ‘compare’ impressions of Lady Bradeen – who neither of them know.

Part XXVI. The two women then compare their own marriage prospects comeptatively. The young woman realises that they are both doomed to live in obscurity. Nevertheless, compared to Mrs Jordan, she feels fortunate.

Part XXVII. Mrs Jordan then reveals that Captain Everard has no money at all, but lots of debts, and was involved in a social scandal from which Lady Bradeen saved him – but forced him to marry her as the price for doing so.

The young woman departs, more glad than ever to have the prospect of her own home and marriage to Mr Mudge.

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

In the Orchard

September 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and full text

In the Orchard was written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by he friend and fellow Bloomsbury Group member T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf – by Vanessa Bell

In the Orchard – critical commentary

Structure

The story is in three parts, each one starting with the same words ‘Miranda slept in the orchard’. The external events alluded to remain the same in each section, but the images and leitmotifs, and to some extent the perspective changes in each section – which are only signaled by extra space between paragraphs.

Content

Part One – In this section the dominant motifs are sounds – the cries of the children learning multiplication tables; the church organ where Hymns Ancient and Modern are being played; the church bells when women are being churched; and the squeak of the weather vane on the church tower as the wind changes direction. These elements are also are also discussed on a vertical axis in relationship to each other.

Part Two – In this section the content is largely Miranda’s thoughts about herself in relationship to the world – on a cliff or in relationship to the sea. She perceives these elements as connected. But they are interspersed with some of the same elements from Part One – the children in school, the cry of the drunken man, the Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Part Three – In this section there is an almost geometric account of the orchard space itself, with the apple-trees growing out of the ground, birds flitting across between its walls, and an emphasis on the relationship between the earth and the air.

The elements of this piece are distinctly rural – an orchard, a village church, apple trees, the herding of cattle – though it has to be said that Virginia Woolf went on to produce the same effects in the urban landscape of Mrs Dalloway.

Biography

It should be noted that at a biographical level of commentary, all of the elements of this story would be available when sitting in the garden at Monk’s House, where Virginia Woolf was living at the time. The garden of the House is adjacent to both the church and the local school, and the whole area is surrounded by the working environment of farming and livestock production.

Style and experimentation

Virginia Woolf was very close to a number of painters who were members of the Bloomsbury Group – primarily her sister Vanessa Bell and Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, but also the painter and art theorist Roger Fry whose biography she wrote.

They were all interested in escaping the demand for descriptive detail in painting, and rendering only what Roger Fry called ‘essential form’. That is, they wanted to render only the basic visual elements of a composition. It was a step towards what we now call ‘abstraction’. In the Orchard is fairly clearly an experiment in doing something similar with prose, rather than paint.

In Woolf’s case she removes the normal substance of prose fiction – the element of a human being involved in some form of drama – and substitutes a combination of visual imagery, of philosophic reflections, and grammatical constructs which tie these elements together. This experimental story is an exercise in what might be called literary cubism – the same scene is viewed from different perspectives. It also has elements of what many people would probably wish to call ‘impressionism’ – the fleeting evocation of sounds, light, colours, and wind to create a sense of the flux of everyday existence.

When the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and tat just above her face.

The changing subject – the flitting from visual image to aural echo, and on to geographic context – from light and shade to chimes, and on to clouds or the waves of the sea – is a literary device she used in major works from Jacob’s Room (1922) to Between the Acts (1941). She made it her own – like a signature style.

The only other prominent modernist writer who used it (but at a far slower tempo) was Marcel Proust, and interestingly enough he was doing it at the same time in the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdus he published between 1913 and 1927 and which Virginia Woolf read with great enthusiasm.

Woolf also moves fluently between narrative modes – from third person omniscient to (briefly) first person, and then back again

and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table) …

The human element of fiction

There does appear to be a human subject in the narrative – Miranda in the orchard. But she is asleep (or may not be) and she has no more importance than the other elements of the narrative except as an object to which the focus of attention keeps returning.

It is a successful exercise, a sketch, a literary experiment to place alongside Monday or Tuesday or Kew Gardens. But it does emphasise the fact that the essence of fictional narratives (as distinct from word-painting and lyrical descriptions) is that we expect to find some sort of human drama enacted, no matter how simple or understated.

The nearest we get to this here is Miranda (provided that she is not asleep) enjoys a sort of epiphany when linking together the elements of her sense experiences and feeling a one-ness with the world around her. But it has to be said that the epiphany is more of the author’s making than enacted properly in Miranda’s consciousness. Woolf as author is making these connections between the earth, the air, the wind, the orchard, and even the cabbages. She does not persuade us that Miranda is conscious of them.

In the Orchard – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

In the Orchard – the text

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde ou le rire des filles eclate le mieux. …’ as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

Four feet in the air above her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamour passed four feet above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and, striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

Next there was a solitary cry — sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind drunk.

Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue, thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of field-fares flying at an enormous speed — somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.

Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east. The wind changed. Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’.

Miranda slept in the orchard — or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved slightly, as if she were saying ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde … ou le rire des filles … eclate … eclate … eclate’, and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or, Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea — into the sea she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought she had heard life itself crying out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages.

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying around her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider — and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’

Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple dress stretched between the two apple-trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees/in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into branches and formed into red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and the apples hung straight across the wall again.

Writing – I

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

It All Adds Up

May 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

It All Adds Up (1994) is a collection of non-fiction writing that Saul Bellow published shortly before his last two novels, The Actual (1997) and Ravelstein (2000). The collection includes reflections on the relationship between literature and politics, travel writing, potted biographies of his famous contemporaries, and a clutch of interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

The collection benefits from spanning more or less the whole of his writing career – from the immediate post-war period when he visited Europe for the first time, up to his personal memoir of friendship with Allan Bloom that formed the basis for his highly acclaimed and last novel.

The assembly of these essays and social criticism also confirms the consistency of his interests and beliefs. He was very conscious throughout his writing career of being the son of a poor Jewish immigrants (his father was a bootlegger during the Depression). He was also from Canada – though the family moved to live in Chicago. This was a city with which he felt powerful emotional ties, even though he was well aware of its violence corruption.

As he became more successful he took up university teaching posts in New York and the Eastern seaboard – which he repeatedly contrasted with the mid-West in order to take the moral and social temperature of America as a whole. And as an immigrant he never stopped thinking about the choice every immigrant has to make – to maintain ethnic origins, or to assimilate as an ‘American’, even though it might never be possible to comfortably believe in oneself as such.

The earliest study is a piece of reportage commissioned by Partisan Review the left-wing journal with which Bellow (as a Trotskyite) was closely associated. The essay documents travels through Spain at a time when General Franco still held his dictatorial grip on the country. It includes details of the grinding poverty, the police arrests, and such bizarre details as the fact that possession of a radio required a permit.

He clearly felt at home with the freewheeling (and hard-drinking) intellectuals with whom he shared his academic life. He taught joint courses in political philosophy and what we now call cultural history with Allan Bloom. He supported the poet John Berryman in his battles again an unsympathetic administration and against the alcoholism that eventually contributed to his early death by suicide.

The collection also includes his acceptance lecture on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 The essay is a spirited and thoughtful summation of his reflections on literature and society. As something of a conservative he sketches a picture of falling standards and trivialization in public culture. (His friend Allan Bloom’s major opus was called The Closing of the American Mind.) Against this perceived vulgarity and ignorance he poses the humanising influence of classics:

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions’. This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.

This is quite a difficult argument to justify theoretically, because it assumes that we are somehow ‘morally improved’ by exposure to high art. John Carey in his excellent study What Good are the Arts? challenges this supposition using the term ‘the religion of art’. But it has to be said that Saul Bellow, throughout all his novels and his non-fiction writing has wrestled with this problem of the potentially ennobling power of great literature – and it was for this reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up, New York: Viking, 1994, pp.327, ISBN: 0141188820

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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Twentieth century literature

Italo Svevo biography

February 24, 2016 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the Austro-Italian writer Aron Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire – and remained so until the end of the first world war. His mother was Italian, and his father a German Jewish businessman. He was educated with his brothers at a commercial school in Wurzburg, Germany, where he became fluent in the language. Italian was actually his second language, the first being the Triestine dialect which was used at home.

After two further years of business studies in Trieste, he was forced to abandon his studies when his father’s glassware business went bankrupt. He took up employment as a correspondence clerk in the Viennese Union Bank, where he stayed for the next twenty years. During this time he produced his first novel, Una vita (A Life) (1893). Like all his other books, it was published at his own expense.

Following the death of his parents he married his cousin Livia Veneziano, the daughter of a wealthy Italian who manufactured specialised industrial paints used on warships. In 1897 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business and was quite successful in commercial activities, making profitable excursions to France and Germany, and setting up a branch of the company in England.

In 1898 he published his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older). Both of these novels were largely ignored at the time, but in 1907 Svevo was enrolled at the Berlitz School of Languages to learn English, where his tutor was a twenty-five year old James Joyce, who had taken up exile in Trieste. Joyce read the novels and championed Svevo’s work. The two men became great friends.

However, Svevo was discouraged by his lack of literary success, and appears to have given up writing completely around that time. He devoted the next twenty-five years to his work as a representative for the family paint business in which, despite his cultural and intellectual interests, he was successfully enterprising. He lived for some time in the borough of Greenwich in south London, documenting the differences he encountered in Edwardian English culture in a series of letters he wrote to his wife: This England is So Different: Italo Svevo’s London Writings.

In 1925 when Svevo published La Conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), Joyce arranged for the work to be translated into French and published in Paris. The work was critically acclaimed and marked his first major success. He entered into a second phase of creativity and produced a number of stories, a novella, and an unfinished novel. He spent the last years of his life lecturing on his own work and writing Further Confessions of Zeno, which was never completed. In 1928 he was involved in a motoring accident in Trieste and he died a few days later from his injuries.

Italo Svevo – principal works

1893 – Una vita (A Life)

1898 – Senilità (As a Man Grows Older

1925 – La conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)

1926 – La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla

1926 – Una burla riuscita (A Perfect Hoax)

1927 – La madre (The Mother)

Italo Svevo – study resources

A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

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Jacob’s Room

May 6, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Jacob’s Room (1922) was the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels that she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. She knew that the form of literary experimentation she contemplated would not be welcome by other publishers, so she took the opportunity to push her radical approach to narrative fiction as far as she could. The result was a big success in two senses. It produced a radical contribution to the modernist movement in a novel which sits coherently alongside other literary works such as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). And it gave her the confidence to realise that she had succeeded in producing something new and original which expressed her own sense of an authentic ‘inner voice’.

I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, passion, humour, everything, as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence— a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress of things—that’s the doubt; but conceive Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, and Unwritten Novel taking hands and dancing in unity.

Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room – critical commentary

Experimentation

This is the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels in which she made a radical and decisive shift away from conventional prose narrative. What the outcome would be, she wasn’t sure, but she realised that she was onto something quite new.

The most obvious innovation is that the narrative is discontinuous and the novel does not a have a plot in the conventional sense. The story starts on one topic or character, then switches to something or somebody else with no warning or explanation. Readers are dropped into a situation, and are left to work out the who, when, and where of the subject with very little assistance. Few clues are given, and after a few lines of developing a topic, Woolf changes it again to something else.

Connections between these fragments of narrative ultimately become perceptible, but only after a lot of patience and work on the reader’s part.

Point of view

There is also a repeatedly shifting point of view. A character such as Betty Flanders in the opening of the novel might be used as a focalising mechanism. We see events from her perspective or are presented with her inner thoughts – such as her ambiguous feelings about her correspondent and suitor Captain Barfoot. But then the narrative switches to present her not as the subject, but as the object of someone else’s point of view.

‘Scarborough,’ Mrs Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint brush

Charles Steele has no connection with Betty, other than being on the beach at the same time, but for the next page or so we see Betty from his point of view as a figure in his painting, he speaks to Betty’s son, and we are given a glimpse into his thoughts about painting, and then he disappears and will never appear in the novel again.

Literary modernism

What is Virginia Woolf trying to achieve in this form of story telling? She had criticised contemporary fiction (particularly that of Arnold Bennett) in her 1919 essay Modern Novels because she thought most novelists failed to give a proper account of what life was like. They piled up fact after fact about their characters, but were unable to create any sense of the ‘pulse of life’ or the poetry of what it was like to be alive.

So her literary impressionism (or cubism?) was an attempt to give an account of the simultaneity of people’s existences as they lived alongside each other. Some connections were meaningful, others were no more than coincidence.

Interestingly enough, she uses the city as both a subject and symbol of modernism in exactly the same way as her contemporaries Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913), Andrei Bely St Petersburg (1913), James Joyce Ulysses (1922), and Alfred Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz, (1929).

The throngs of people flowing incessantly across Waterloo Bridge are offered as a compressed image of anonymous urban humanity in its many guises.

All the time the stream of people never ceases passing from the Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. It seems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now traipsed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph.

Reflections and communication

But there are further elements to her technical experimentation. She added to her narrative strategies the device of embedding lyrically poetic reflections on life and the natural world – passages which are a combination of prose poem and philosophic meditation. Mrs Flanders and Jacob send letters to each other in an attempt at communication which often fails for Betty, because Jacob does not reveal his inner life (something many parents will recognise) but Woolf interrupts the story to reflect on written correspondence:

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien.

Almost all the conversations between characters are fragmentary – snatches of speech which do little more than identify a subject and demonstrate that some attempt at communication is taking place, despite the fact that in many cases waht is revealed is a lack of understanding.

The flux of time

There are also some well-orchestrated temporal shifts which contribute to the destabilization of the narrative flow but reinforce the sense of ‘architecture’ Woolf said she wished to bring to the novel. Jacob and his brother Archer are tutored as a boys by the young clergyman Mr Floyd, who makes an unsuccessful offer of marriage to Mrs Flanders.

But the letter Mr Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin ‘I am much surprised’, and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush of Andover; long after he had left the village.

The flash forward (technical term ‘prolepsis’) tells us that he later marries Miss Wimbush and leaves to live somewhere else. In fact within a short paragraph a potted life history gives the full trajectory of his future life as a clergyman, a college principal, and a writer, right up to his retirement, at which point he sees the mature Jacob in Piccadilly but does not speak to him.

Two hundred pages later, when the novel has followed Jacob’s development as a young man to (almost) full maturity the same incident is repeated, this time from Jacob’s point of view.

This fluid telescoping of time is also conducted at a macro level where the same scene might be described in the narrative present, then shift to consider how it might have seemed in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century.

Fragmentation

One problem in this technique of extreme fragmentation is that characters who seem important at one point in the narrative do not appear again and are not relevant to any major theme other than the fact that people’s lives sometimes overlap. There is no resolution to the Betty Flanders and Captain Barfoot connection for instance. He is an important suitor to Betty in the opening pages of the novel (even though he is already married – but to an invalid). But we never learn what happens to this connection. All it tells us is that Betty Flanders is obviously an attractive women to men of varied ages.

Woolf was to use all these techniques more successfully in her later works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, where they seem to have been anchored more coherently to the characters and the underlying themes. But it is here that she was trying them out for the first time.

Jacob’s Room – study resources

Jacob’s Room – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Jacob’s Room – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Jacob’s Room – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Jacob’s Room – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Jacob’s Room – the holograph draft – Amazon UK

Jacob’s Room – Kindle annotated edition – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Jacob’s Room – plot summary

It is extremely difficult to summarise the plot, for reasons that are made clear in the critical commentary above. Virginia Woolf was experimenting with a new form of narrative in which the ‘story’ shifts from one topic to another – even within the same paragraph or sentence. She tried to create a form of story telling in which several things are being discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity. This was not unlike the form of experimentation going on in the visual arts – particularly cubism, which strove to depict images of a single object from multiple points of view in the same two dimensional picture. For further comments on this feature of Virginia Woolf’s literary techniques, see my review article Virginia Woolf and Cubism.

Part I. Elizabeth (Betty) Flanders, recently widowed, is on holiday on a beach in Cornwall with her sons Archer and Jacob.

Part II. At home in Scarborough, Betty receives a marriage proposal from Reverend Floyd. Her friend Mrs Jarvis has romantic yearnings. Captain Barfoot (a married suitor) calls on Mrs Flanders.

Part III. Jacob goes to Trinity College Cambridge. He integrates with undergraduate life, though he’s a little awkward. Sunday lunch at a don’s house, and late night discussions with fellow students.

Part IV. Summer vacation. Jacob and his friend Timothy Durrant sail round the coast of Cornwall. They are present at a dinner party given by Timmy’s wealthy mother. He meets Clara Durrant.

Part V. Jacob in London after graduating, amidst scenes of metropolitan complexity. He visits the opera (Tristran and Isolde) with the Durrants. He writes a critical essay which is not published.

Part VI. Jacob socialises in London amidst artistic types. At November 5th celebrations he meets Florinda at a fancy dress party and takes her back to his lodgings.

Part VII. Jacob is present at a musical evening, and he meets Clara Durrant again.

Part VIII. Betty Flanders writes to Jacob, hoping for meaningful and substantial news. But Jacob does not reveal the essence of his life to her, which includes the fact that he realises that Florinda is a tart.

Part IX. Jacob goes hunting in Essex and socialises in upper middle class circles, and at the same times visits prostitutes. He also spends time in the British Museum Library, researching the poetry of Christopher Marlowe.

Part X. Ex-Slade School of Art student Fanny Elmer models for an artist and meets Jacob in his studio. She is deeply impressed with Jacob, and buys a copy of Tom Jones on his recommendation.

Part XI. Jacob inherits £100 from a relative and goes to France with his artistic friends. Betty Flanders visits the Scarborough moors with her friend Mrs Jarvis.

Part XII. Jacob travels on alone through Italy and Greece, writing to his friend Bonamy. He meets fellow English tourists Mr and Mrs Wentworth Williams and falls in love with the wife, Sandra.

Part XIII. The principal characters are seen in London during the summer. Bonamy’s gay infatuation with Jacob is made clear.

Part XIV. Bonamy and Betty Flanders clear out Jacob’s room following his death during the war.

Jacob’s Room – principal characters

Elizabeth (Betty) Flanders	widow from Scarborough (45)
Archer Flanders	her eldest son
Jacob Alan Flanders	her middle son
John Flanders	her youngest son
Charles Steele	a painter on the beach in Cornwall
Mrs Pearce	Cornish lodging house owner
Rebecca	family servant
Captain Barfoot	Betty’s correspondent and suitor (50)
Mrs Barfoot	an invalid, his wife
Mr Dickens	Mrs Barfoot’s wheelchair attendant
Seabrook Flanders	Betty’s dead husband
Morty	Betty’s brother who goes to the East
Andrew Floyd	young clergyman and suitor to Betty
Mrs Jarvis	Betty’s friend, a romantic and needy clergyman’s wife
Timothy (Timmy) Durrant	Jacob’s friend at Cambridge who becomes a clerk in Whitehall
George Plummer	Cambridge don and professor of physics
Mrs Plummer	his wife
Mrs Pascoe	a Cornish woman
Mrs Durrant	Timmy’s rich mother
Clara Durrant	Timmy’s sister
Richard Bonamy	Jacob’s gay friend at Cambridge
Florinda	a loose girl in bohemian London
Lauretta	a prostitute
Fanny Elmer	an ex-Slade student who falls for Jacob
Edward Cruttendon	a friend of Jacob’s
Mallinson	a painter friend of Jacob’s
Jinny Carslake	a friend on the trip to Paris
Sandra Wentworth Williams	flirtatious woman in hotel in Greece
Evan Williams	her jealous husband

first edition, 1922 – cover design Vanessa Bell

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

James Joyce – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1882. James Joyce was born in Dublin, the eldest of ten children. His father was a rather improvident tax collector. The family became progressively impoverished.

1888. He was educated in Jesuit schools, with emphasis on Catholic and scholastic doctrine. [These establishments were also renowned for their intellectual rigour.] Joyce was a talented student, especially good at languages. He moved from being devout to bitterly anti-Catholic. These experiences were later used as material for his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1893. Enters Belvedere College, a Jesuit boys’ day school – fees having been waived because of family’s needy circumstances.

1894. Joyce reads Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses and writes theme on Ulysses as ‘my favourite hero’.

1897. Wins prize for best English composition in Ireland for his age group.

1898. Studies languages at University College, Dublin. Rebels against Church, Family, and the State. Begins to read Ibsen. Active campaigner for freedom of expression and equality for women.

1902 Leaves university to study medicine in Paris, but gives it up and writes reviews for newspapers.

1904. Back in Dublin following his mother’s death, Joyce meets Nora Barnacle on June 10, subsequently to be known as ‘Bloomsday’ and used as temporal setting for Ulysses. Opposed to marriage, but unable to live together because of moral climate at that time, they move to Trieste and live there for the next ten years. Joyce earns a precarious living teaching English at the Berlitz School of Languages.

1905. Joyce writing stories which are later collected as Dubliners, and Stephen Hero, a novel based on his own early life. Supported by his brother Stanislaus.

James Joyce is an acclaimed biography, considered by many to be the definitive account of Joyce’s life and work. Richard Ellmann has a sympathetic grasp of Joyce’s personality. A reverence for his literary accomplishment is balanced by a bemused affection for his weaknesses. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches to Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or writing erotic messages to his future wife, Ellmann’s account always shows us a genius and a human being. This latest edition has been revised and expanded to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, and previously unknown letters.

1907. Publishes Chamber Music (poems). Financial hardship partly self-induced as a result of erratic and improvident lifestyle. Eyesight problems begin.

1908. Begins revising Stephen Hero. Many unsuccessful attempts to have Dubliners published.

1909. Returns to Dublin and opens the city’s first cinema – the ‘Volta’.

1912. Lectures on Defoe and Blake at Trieste University. Passes Italian state exams to become a teacher. Lectures on Hamlet.

1913. Writes Giacomo Joyce, a novella based on unconsummated affair with one of his language students. Corresponds with American poet Ezra Pound, who begins serialization of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his magazine the Egoist.

1914. Joyce’s annus mirablis. Publication of Dubliners. Begins writing Ulysses.

1915. Completes Exiles, a play. Family moves to neutral Switzerland during first world war. Zurich important centre for arts, theatre, and political exiles. Awarded a grant (£75) from Royal Literary Fund.

1917. American and English editions of Portrait well received. Further eye operations. Harriet Shaw Weaver begins her financial support which lasts throughout the rest of Joyce’s life: (she even pays for his funeral).

1918. Serialization of Ulysses begins in the American magazine Little Review. Reputation grows. Forms a theatrical group, the English Players, and stages The Importance of Being Earnest.

1919. Copies of Little Review confiscated and burned by US Postal Authorities. Family returns to Trieste.

1920. Family moves to live in Paris for next twenty years. Friendships with Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S.Eliot. Supported by American bookshop owner Sylvia Beech.

1921. Little Review prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for publishing extracts from Ulysses. Sylvia Beech offers to publish under the imprint of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company.

1922. Ulysses printed in Dijon and published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Nora refuses to read it.

1923. Writes the first pages of Finnegans Wake. More eye operations fail to save failing sight. Ulysses pirated in America and copies seized by customs in England.

1927. Fragments of the Wake published in small magazines, but work is constantly revised and re-written.

1930. Publication of Stuart Gilbert’s critical study James Joyce’s Ulysses, written with Joyce’s assistance.

1931. Travels to London with Nora to be married ‘for testamentary reasons’ following the death of his father. Daughter Lucia goes mad after falling in love with Samuel Beckett, who was then acting as Joyce’s secretary.

1934. First publication in USA of Ulysses by Random House. Travels to Switzerland to be near Lucia who was in a mental institution. Almost blind, Joyces writes in coloured crayons.

1935. Continues work on Finnegans Wake. (Nora describes it as – “that chop suey he’s writing”).

1936. First publication in UK of Ulysses by Bodley Head.

1939. Finnegans Wake published in London and New York in the year of Joyce’s fifty-seventh birthday.

1941. Following the occupation of France, Joyces move back to neutral Switzerland. Joyce dies after an abdominal operation. (Joyce’s dates 1882-1941 identical to those of Virginia Woolf.)

The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), while another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.

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James Joyce A Critical Guide

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography, explication, criticism

It is interesting to note that almost all of the great writers of the modernist movement published their seminal texts within a few years of each other: D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in 1925, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial in the same year. James Joyce A Critical Guide, an introduction to the writer and his work, is split into three sections. The first deals with Joyce’s life and the context in which his works were produced.

The second is an examination of his major publications, treated in the order that they were written. And the third is an account of the critical responses that his work has evoked over the years. Now that James Joyce is established as part of the canon of modernist literature, it’s easy to forget the public difficulties and personal sacrifices he made in order that his version of art be given a fair hearing. As Lee Spinks observes:

His systematic transformation of the nature and scope of the novel and his protracted struggle against the legal censorship and suppression of his work extended the possibilities of modern art and helped to redraw the boundaries between the claims of public morality and the rights of artistic expression for his own and succeeding generations.

Part One is a very enjoyable account of Joyce’s life and his artistic development, with occasional excursions into Irish politics and history. Joyce’s personal existence was restless, peripatetic, and pan-European, yet in his work he wrote about the same thing all his life – Ireland, the country to which he never returned.

In Part Two Spinks offers a critical account of each of Joyce’s major works. This includes their genesis, their themes, and in particular the development of his literary style. This represents an almost continuous line of increasing complexity from 1905 to 1939 with the publication of Finnegans Wake. This is the largest section of the book, and each of its parts is supplemented by suggestions for further reading.

I was glad to note that there was a full account of the very tangled and much-debated status of the text of Ulysses. This was supposed to be settled conclusively with the publication of Hans Walter Gabler’s ‘corrected edition’ of 1986, but despite his supposed rigorous editorial method, it seems to have made matters even worse. Spinks opts to recommend Jeri Johnson’s critical edition of Ulysses (1988) published by Oxford University Press.

Part Three deals with the critical reception of Joyce’s work. Spinks points to the fact that right from the beginning as Joyce’s work began to appear in various little magazines, it tended to divide opinion quite markedly. Many critics at first objected to his frankness and consideration of topics (sex, religion) which we now regard as quite harmless. Others admired the freshness and originality of his style. It was the publication of Ulysses which really galvanized both these tendencies, and we are reminded that the novel was –

a work that was reviled, celebrated, legally examined, banned, pirated and reinterpreted as a modernist ‘classic’ within twenty years of its publication

He splits his observations into two parts – criticism before and after Joyce’s death. The first of these periods sees relatively traditional commentators grappling with the highpoint of literary experimentation and modernism. The second includes all the recently fashionable schools of structuralism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. You’ll need a strong intellectual stomach to cope with some of these critics, many of whom seem more interested in making life difficult rather than throwing instructive light onto somebody else’s work.

Finnegans Wake remains a challenge to them all, for like the other major figures of early literary modernism, Joyce was drawn to push the nature of the novel to almost unreadable limits – just as Woolf did with The Waves, Thomas Mann with Joseph and his Brothers, and Herman Broch did with The Death of Virgil.

But despite the difficulties of his later work, Joyce is an approachable and very amusing writer – which is rare amongst the modernists. Anyone seeking assistance with the deeper aspects of his work would do well to consult a guide such as this. It offers clear and readable pathways through the thickets of both the work and commentary upon it.

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Lee Spinks, James Joyce: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.233, ISBN: 0748638369

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James Joyce criticism

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bibliography of criticism and commentary

Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book, London: Routledge, 1996.

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

Robert H. Deming (ed), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 Vols, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Richard Ellman and Stuart Gilbert (eds), The Letters of James Joyce, 3 Vols, Faber, 1957-66.

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: a Study, Faber and Faber, 1930.

Seon Givens, James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, N.Y.: Vanguard Press, 1963.

S.C. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, Oxford University Press, 1961.

Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1990.

Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, Faber, 1978.

Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, New York: New Directions, 1960.

Colin MacCabe (ed), James Joyce: New Perspectives, Harvester, 1982.

W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982.

Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

C.H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, Arnold, 1977.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void, Macmillan, 1991.

Lee Spinks, James Joyce, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

W.Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, 1959.

The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
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James Joyce – web links

James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

Cornell’s James Joyce Collection
Cornell University – a collection of letters, manuscripts, and books documenting the life and work of James Joyce on exhibition in 2005. Particularly strong on Joyce’s early life.

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James Joyce greatest works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an introduction to the major stories and novels

If you read Joyce’s work in the same order that he wrote it, the sequence forms a perfect James Joyce tutorial. His early writing is simple and easy to understand, then it gradually becomes more complex as he experimented with the possibilities of language. Be prepared to extend the range of your vocabulary, to discover prose blended with poetry, and to encounter amazingly inventive word-play in the later work. Joyce’s writing was also considered quite scandalous when it first appeared, because it is critical of religion and frank about sexual matters.

Dubliners is his first major work – a ground-breaking collection of short stories in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose style. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation – which he called ‘epiphanies’. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic. This collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century. The collection ends with the most famous of all Joyce’s stories – ‘The Dead’. It caused controversy when it first appeared, and was the first of many of Joyce’s works to be banned in his native country. Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories. New readers should start here.
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first complete novel – a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s struggle with Catholicism and his desire to forge himself as an artist. It features a prose style whose complexity develops in parallel with the growth of the hero, Stephen Dedalus. The early pages are written from a child’s point of view, but then they quickly become more sophisticated. As Stephen struggles with religious belief and the growth of his sexual feelings as a young adult, the prose become more complex and philosophical. In addition to the account of his personal life and a critique of Irish society at the beginning of the last century, it also incorporates the creation of an aesthetic philosophy which was unmistakably that of Joyce himself. The novel ends with Stephen quitting Ireland for good, just as Joyce himself was to do – never to return.
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Ulysses (1922) is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and it is certainly Joyce’s most celebrated work. He takes Homer’s Odyssey as a structural framework and uses it as the base to create a complex story of characters moving around Dublin on a single day in June 1904. Each separate chapter is written in a different prose style to reflect its theme or subject. The novel also includes two forms of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This was Joyce’s attempt to reproduce the apparently random way in which our perceptions of the world are mixed with our conscious ideas and memories in an unstoppable flow of thought. There is a famous last chapter which is an eighty page unpunctuated soliloquy of a woman as she lies in bed at night, mulling over the events of her life and episodes from the previous day.
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Finnegans Wake is famous in literary circles as a great novel which almost no one has ever read. Joyce said that he spent seventeen years of his life writing Finnegans Wake and that he expected readers to spend the rest of their lives trying to understand it. It continues where Ulysses leaves off in terms of linguistic complexity. Written and rewritten many times over, Joyce eventually decided to incorporate many languages other than English into the narrative. It is a fantastic crossword-puzzle of puns, parodies, jokes and linguistic invention which make enormous intellectual demands on the reader. This, in addition to the many arcane references and a very complex narrative make Finnegans Wake a literary experiment which has never been surpassed. It is one of the great unread masterpieces of twentieth century literature.
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The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce contains eleven essays by an international team of leading Joyce scholars. The topics covered include his debt to Irish and European writers and traditions, his life in Paris, and the relation of his work to the ‘modern’ spirit of sceptical relativism. One essay describes Joyce’s developing achievement in his earlier works (Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Another tackles his best-known text, asking the basic question ‘What is Ulysses about, and how can it be read?’ The issue of ‘difficulty’ raised by Finnegans Wake is directly addressed, and the reader is taken through questions of theme, language, structure and meaning, as well as the book’s composition and the history of Wake criticism.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

James Joyce – web links

James Joyce at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

James Joyce at Project Gutenberg
A limited collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

James Joyce at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of the major works, religion, music, list of biographies, and external web links.

James Joyce at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plus box office, technical credits, and quizzes.

James Joyce Centre in Dublin
Exhibition centre, walking tours, lectures, and newsletter. The latest addition is a graphic novel version of ‘Ulysses’.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection
University of Wisconsin – digitised scans of Finnegans Wake and out-of-print studies on Joyce’s language, plus rare critical studies.

An Annotated Ulysses
An online version of Ulysses with hyperlinks giving explanations of obscure and classical references in the text.

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