Un libro una hora: 1984 de George Orwell

 

1984 de George Orwell - Análisis - A NIVEL AVANZADO

The World of James Joyce (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Is There Anyone Who Understands Me? The World of James Joyce. 

Prod. and dir. Seán ó Mórdha. Ireland: RTE, 1982. Written by Colbert Kearney. 

YouTube (Manufacturing Intellect) 4 Nov. 2017.  

("The World of James Joyce: His Life & Work documentary (1986) [sic]").

https://youtu.be/4IwrHkNUk24

         2020

George Orwell, Aldous Huxley : "1984" ou "Le meilleur des mondes" ? (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Un documentaire en français sur les romans d'anticipation de Huxley (Brave New World) et d'Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) aujourd'hui devenus trop proches de la réalité—une critique du totalitarisme présent et futur.

(But.... careful!  Don't trust the fake news on Donald Trump etc.  Trust only the trustworthy ones...! You'll have to decide for yourself.)

The New Novelists of the 1950s (NIVEL AVANZADO)

(from The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

Yet more novelists of the 1950s-1980s

Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: Huxley y Orwell

Dos obras claves de la ciencia ficción política tenéis que conocer:

-  Brave New World de Aldous Huxley (1932) (Un mundo feliz).



- y  Nineteen-Eighty Four de George Orwell (1949).  De quien también es importante hoy Animal Farm, una fábula sobre el comunismo totalitario.

Constantemente se vuelven de mayor y mayor actualidad, con cuestiones como la tecnología del cuerpo y la eugenesia, el control de la opinión pública con los medios de comunicación de masas, o la invasión y control de la privacidad con el progreso tecnológico.

Aquí una entrevista sobre la vida y obra de Orwell.


Un documental: ORWELL, A LIFE IN PICTURES.



Y un programa de radio, en francés sobre Huxley:


Une Vie, une Œuvre - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
 https://youtu.be/er8twccFbMY

Virginia Woolf - Bloomsbury and Beyond

Bloomsbury and Beyond: 

 From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders:

When the narrator of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited goes up to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1922 he decorates his college rooms with objects indicative of his 'advanced' but essentially derivative taste. Charles Ryder hangs up a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, a painting which had been shown at the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, and he displays a screen painted by Roger Fry that he has acquired at the closing sale at Fry's pioneering Omega Workshops (a byword for the clumsily experimental interior design of the period). He also shows off a collection of books which he later embarrassedly describes as 'meagre and commonplace.' These books include volumes of Georgian Poetry (the last in the series of which had just appeared), once popular and mildly sensational novels by Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) and Norman Douglas (1868-1952), Roger Fry's Vision and Design of 1920 and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918. These last two volumes, issued in a similar popular format in the early 1920s, are the clearest signals of the extent to which the young Ryder has been influenced by the canons of taste enunciated by the group of writers and artists who have come to be known as the 'Bloomsbury Group'.

'Bloomsbury' was never a formal grouping. Its origins lay in male frienships in late nineteenth-century Cambridge; in the early 1900s it found a focus in the Gordon Square house of the children of Leslie Stephen in unfashionable Bloomsbury; it was only with the formation of the 'Memoir Club' in 1920 that it loosely defined the limits of its friendships, relationships, and sympathies. The 'Memoir Club' originally centred on Leslie Stephen's two daughters Virginia and Vanessa, their husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends and neighbours Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The group was linked by what Clive Bell later called 'a taste for discussion in the pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling, contempt for conventional morals if you will'. Their discussions combined tolerant agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined self-advertisement.  When in 1928 Bell (1881-1964) attempted to define 'Civilization' (in a book of that name) he identified an aggrandized Bloomsbury ideal in the douceur de vivre and witty iconoclasm of the France of the Enlightenment (though, as Virginia Woolf commented, 'in the end it turns out that civilization is a lunch party at No 50 Gordon Square'). To its friends 'Bloomsbury' offered a prevision of a relaxed, permissive and élitist future; to its enemies, like the once patronized and later estranged D. H. Lawrence, it was a tight little world peopled by upper-middle-class 'black beetles'.

The prime 'Bloomsbury' text, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, suggests that it is easier to see what the group did not represent than what it did. Strachey's book struck a sympathetic chord with both his friends and the public at large. Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four succint biographies of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, seemed to many readers to deliver the necessary coup de grâce to the false ideals and empty heroism of the nineteenth century. These were principles which seemed to have been tried on the Western Front and found disastrously wanting. Strachey (1880-1932) does not so much mock his subjects as let them damn themselves in the eyes of their more enlightened successors. He works not by frontal assault by by means of the sapping innuendo and the carefully placed, explosive epigram. His models, like Bell's, are the Voltaire and conversationalists of the Paris salons of the eighteenth century, not the earnest Carlylean lectures of Victorian London. When, for example, he speculates about Florence Nightingale's conception of God he jests that 'she felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer'. In a review written in 1909 Strachey had endorsed the idea that 'the first duty of a great historian is to be an artist'. As his later studies of Queen Victoria (1921) and of Elizabeth and Essex (1928) suggest, Strachey was neither a great historian nor, ultimately, a great biographer, but he was undoubtedly an innovative craftsman. The 'art' of biography has never been quite the same since. It is not simply that he was an iconoclast; he was the master of a prose of elegant disenchantment. His age, if it did not always cultivate elegance, readily understood disenchantment.

Strachey's biographies challenged the conventional wisdom of interpretation. They sprang, like the disparate essays assembled in Roger Fry's Vision and Design, from an urge to establish a new way of seeing and observing which was distinct from the stuffy pieties of the Victorians. Fry's title carefully avoids the word 'form', but it is that word, linked to the crucially qualifying adjective 'significant', which weaves, by direct reference and by implication, in and out of the twenty-five short essays. Although Vision and Design is primarily dedicated to reconsiderations of painting and sculpture, the implications of its theoretical formulations for the experimental fiction of Virginia Woolf are considerable. In his 'Essays in Aesthetics' Fry distinguishes between 'instinctive reactions to sensible objects' and the peculiarly human faculty of 'calling up again . . . the echo of past experiences' in the imagination. The 'whole consciousness', he argues, 'may be focussed upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience' and thus produced in the imaginative life 'a different set of values, and a different kind of perception'. As the 'chief organ of the imaginative life' Art works by a set of values distinct from those of pure representation. When he specifically returns to his argument in the book's final 'Retrospect' Fry offers a further definition of the term 'significant form'  as 'something other than agreeable arrangements of form, harmonious patterns, and the like'. A work of art possessing this elusive, and seemingly indefinable quality implies, he asserts, 'the effort on the part of the artist to bend to our emotional understanding by means of his passionate conviction some intractable material which is alien to our spirit'.

Virginia Woolf's criticism distils and reapplies Bell's and Fry's aesthetic ideas as a means of arguing for the potential freedom of the novel from commonly received understandings of plot, time, and identity. In discussing the revision of traditional modes of representation in her essay 'Modern Fiction', Woolf (1882-1941) insists that each day 'the mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel'. The novelist, attempting to work with this 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms', is forced to recognize that 'if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention', there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe 'in the accepted style'. The task of the future novelist, Woolf therefore suggests, is to convey an impression of the 'luminous halo' of life—'this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit'—with as little mixture of the 'alien and external' as possible. What Woolf seeks to defend in her essays is not necessarily a new range of subjects for the novel, but new ways of rendering and designing the novel. She does more than present a challenge to the received idea of realism; she reaches out to a new aesthetic of realism. Essentially, she defines her own work, and that of contermporaries, such as Lawrence and Joyce, against the example of the Edwardian 'materialists' (and Arnold Bennett in particular) who, to her mind, laid too great a stress on 'the fabric of things'. Not only did they weigh their fiction down with a plethora of external detail, they too readily accepted the constraints of conventional obedience to 'plot' and sequential development. Much as Roger Fry had seen the liberated artist 'bending' intractable material into significance, Woolf insists that the twentieth-century novelist could evolve a new fictional form out of a representation of the 'myriad impressions' which daily impose themselves on the human consciousness.

As Virginia Woolf's fictional style developed beyond the relatively conventional parameters of The Voyage Out (1915) to the experimental representations of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), specific characterization recedes and the detailed exploration of the individual identity tends to melt into a larger and freer expression. The discontinuities, fragmentations, and disintegrations which her avant-garde artistic contemporaries observed in both the external and the spiritual world become focused for Woolf in the idea, noted in her diary in 1924, of character 'dissipated into shreds'. Her novels attempt both to 'dissipate' character and to reintegrate human experience within an aesthetic shape or 'form'. She seeks to represent the nature of transient sensation, or of conscious and unconscious mental activity, and then to relate it outwards to a more universal awareness of pattern and rhythm. The momentary reaction, the impermanent emotion, the ephemeral stimulus, the random suggestion, and the dissociated thought are effectively 'bent' into a stylistic relationship to something coherent and structured. A 'coherence in things' is what Mrs Ramsay recognizes in a visionary, and quasi-religious, moment of peace in To the Lighthouse as 'as stability . . . something . . . immune from change'. The supposedly random picture of the temporal in Woolf's later fiction is also informed and 'interpreted' by the invocation of the permanent and universal, much as the 'arbitrary' in nature was 'interpreted' with reference to post-Darwinian science, or the complexities of the human psyche unravelled by the application of newly fashionable Freudian theory. Although her characters may often seem to be dissolved into little more than ciphers, what they come to signify is part of a complex iconographic discourse. In the instances of To the Lighthouse and The Waves the glancing insights into the identities of characters are complemented by larger symbols (a flickering lightouse or moving water) which are allowed to be both temporary and permanent, both 'real' and resonant, both constant and fluctuating. The fictional whole thus become a normative expression of certain Modernist themes and modes. Woolf's particular preoccupation with time is closely related to her manifest interest in flux, a dissolution or dissipation of distinctions within a fluid pattern of change and decay, which she recognizes in nature and science as much as in the human psyche.

The informing presence of women characters with an aesthetic propensity, or of particular women artists, serves to moderate and condition the larger ambitions of the narratives in which they appear. Although Virginia Woolf rarely directly echoes the insistent narrative voice of a George Eliot, her own work does reflect what she recognized in her pioneer essay on Eliot (1925) as a tendency to introduce characters who stand for 'that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled presence' of the novelist herself. If neither Lily Briscoe nor Miss La Trobe possess the cultural significance of a Romola or a Dorothea, both are allowed, as amateur artists, to act out the ordering dilemma of the professional. In the final part of To the Lighthouse the 'weight' of Lily Briscoe's painting seems to be poised as she explores the elusive nature of mass and form: 'Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.' A similar 'visionary' insight temporarily enlightens the amateur author of the historical pageant around which Between the Acts (1941) is shaped. Miss La Trobe watches entranced as butterflies (traditional images of the human soul) 'gluttonously absorb' the rich colours of the fancy dress strewn on the grass; the possibility of a completer art briefly dawns on her, only to fall apart again. In both novels women's sensibility (and sensitivity) constrasts with the factual 'materialism' of a world dominated by the kind of men who 'negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance' or who insist, as Colonel Mayhew does in Between the Acts, that no picture of history is complete without reference to the British Army. The Mrs Ramsays, the Lily Briscoes, and the Miss La Trobes dream their brief dreams or are vouchsafed momentary 'epiphanies'; the men are often left content with a limited grasp, and presumed control, of the physical world.

Virginia Woolf's most complete, but ambiguous, representation of the life of a woman character's mind in Mrs Dalloway is also her most thorough experiment with the new technique of interior monologue. The novel plays subtly with the problem of an identity which is both multiple and singular, both public and private, and it gradually insists on the mutual dependence and opposition of the perceptions of Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked ramblings of a victim of the war, Septimus Warren Smith. Mrs Dalloway reveals both the particular originality of Woolf's fictional mode and the more general limitations of her social vision. When she returns to the problem of a dissipated identity in her extraordinary tribute to the English aristocracy, Orlando (1928), she seems to seek both to dissolve and define character in a fanciful concoction of English history nad shifting gender. The book is in part a sentimental tribute to the personal flair and ancestral fixation of her aristocratic friend and fellow-writer, Victoria ('Vita') Sackville-West (1892-1962), in part an exploration of a 'masculine' freedom traditionally denied to women. If Woolf's depiction of the society of her time is as blinkered as that of E. M. Forster by upper-middle-class snobberies and would-be liberalisms, the historical perspective which determined her feminism made for a far more distinctive clarity of argument. In the essay 'Street Haunting' (published in 1942) she writes of the pleasures of a London flâneuse who discovers as the front door shuts that the shell-like nature of domestic withdrawal is broken open 'and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye'. Almost the opposite process is delineated in the study A Room of One's Own (1929), where the existence of a private space, and of a private income, is seen as a prerequisite for the development of a woman writer's creativity. A Room of One's Own is, however, far more than an insistent plea for privacy, leisure, and education; it is a proclamation that women's writing has nearly come of age. It meditates on the pervasiveness of women as the subjects of poetry and on their absence from history; it plays as fancifully as the narrator of Orlando might with the domestic fate of a woman Shakespeare, but above all it pays tribute to those English novelists, from Aphra Behn to George Eliot, who established a tradition of women's writing. 'Masterpieces are not single and solitary births', she insisted, 'they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.' It is in this tradition that Virginia Woolf most earnestly sought to see herself, a tradition which to her would eventually force open a way for the woman writer to see human beings 'not always in relation to each otehr but in relation to reality; and to the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves'.

Woolf's 'significant forms', shaped from glancing insights and carefully placed and iterated details, are to some degree echoed in the work of her New Zealand-born contemporary, Katherine Mansfield (the pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, 1888-1923). If Mansfield's success with reviewers and readers seems to have stimulated Woolf's jealousy rather than critical generosity (Woolf generally found Mansfield 'inscrutable'), both writers can be seen as developing the post-impressionist principle of suggestiveness and rhythm from a distinctively feminine point of view. Mansfield worked determinedly on a small scale, concentrating on carefully pointed, delicately elusive short stories. Her succint narratives, collected as In a German Pension (1911), Bliss, and Other Stories (1920), and The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922), are brief triumphs of style, as style which serves both to suggest a pervasive atmosphere and to establish a series of evanescent sensations (creaks, yawns, draughts, cries, footfalls, bird-calls, and cat's miaows). Where In a German Pension conveys a fastidious dislike of Teutonic manners and mannerisms (though Mansfield declined to have the volume reprinted during the Great War), her later stories move towards a greater technical mastery and to a larger world-view. She draws significantly on the landscapes and flora of her native New Zealand (in, for example, 'The Aloe'), she attempts to explore the responses of a wide spectrum of social types, and, by means of a style which takes on a yet more shimmering elusiveness, she endeavours to describe the mysterious 'diversity of life . . . Death included'. Her own untimely death from tuberculosis cut short a remarkable innovative career.

The Mark on the Wall

 

—oOo—