In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf suggests that her greatest moments of pleasure in writing proceed from experiences that she calls “shocks,” experiences of rupture and revelation that intrude into the everyday with the force of “reality” and lead to a “desire to explain”--that is, a desire to put the experiences into words. But for all of the moments of “satisfaction” that Woolf recounts, in which writing seems to lead to a cathartic explanation, there are an equal number of moments of “despair” in which explanation fails: “I could not explain it,” she writes of one such shock. How does writing allow pleasure to emerge from distinctly painful experiences of fragmentation, disorientation, and “avalanche[s] of meaning” that are indistinguishable from meaninglessness? Moreover, how does aesthetic form, which Woolf calls a “whole&rdquo or a “pattern,&rdquo depend upon a “horror,” death, or lack of meaning at its core? My paper poses these questions in relation to Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which the pleasures of Clarissa Dalloway’s party confront the traumas of war.
The main lesson war teaches the shell-shocked soldier Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is how not to feel. In writing her novel Woolf sought to understand how, in the wake of the First World War’s devastating violence, the novel might teach us how to feel again. For Septimus, the problem might be solved by an act of communication in which his “messages” about the renewal of civilization would be received by the Prime Minister. This healing act of communication, however, is ultimately deferred for something more paradoxical: the possibility that “death [is] an attempt to communicate.” I read this connection between feeling and communication in Woolf’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” written concurrently with Mrs. Dalloway, in which she suggests that emotions had to be “broken up” by the war so that they could be felt “in poetry or fiction.” Similarly, for Woolf the meaning of Greek language and civilization is, to the modern world, only ever fragmentary, but these fragments nonetheless have the power to “cut and wound and excite.” Sophocles’ Electra, who punctuates her speeches with what Anne Carson has called “bones of sound,” represents most strongly for Woolf this fragmentary mode of communication. By pushing the act of communication to the extremity of death in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf produces a similar intensity of feeling, a pleasure that is at times indistinguishable from pain. In the novel’s climactic scene, the “horror” that Clarissa Dalloway feels toward Septimus Smith’s suicide (and death in general) combines with an almost ecstatic pleasure in her vicarious imagining of his suicide, which ultimately fuels the “beauty” and “fun” of her party. I argue that death’s communication in Mrs. Dalloway serves as a figure for Woolf’s writing practice: a “not knowing” that, rather than move toward healing, explanation, or catharsis, paradoxically cuts, wounds, and excites.
Scholars often regard Virginia Woolf’s 1941 novel Between the Acts as an elegy for British empire, British literary tradition, and British lives lost during World War II. Given its compositional proximity to Woolf’s suicide in 1941, Between is also often regarded as a proleptic elegy for Woolf herself. In relation to the war that adumbrates the entire text, this critical attention positions the novel as passive: like her suicide, critics imply, Woolf’s last novel reveals an affective surrender to the inevitable forces of masculinist fascism and heteronormative sexism.
On at least two levels, Between would seem to bear out such claims. Its setting at a rural estate aligns the text with a conservative tradition of British country house novels which evince nostalgic regret for natural expanses lost to industrialism. The novel’s thematic preoccupation with history similarly suggests that the text mourns people and institutions lost to time and technological innovation. To characterize Between the Acts as elegaically passive based on these qualities alone, however, is to overlook that the novel is actually quite funny. In addition to the text’s nursery rhymes and musical motifs, the novel’s pageant play offers a comedy of errors in which actors bungle their lines, props malfunction, and cows moo inappropriately. It is no coincidence that the generally unfunny queer character Miss La Trobe organizes the pageant play and that the novel’s climax consists of her struggle to reconcile the play’s humorous failure with her own melancholy reaction to that failure.
In this talk, I argue that La Trobe’s queer affective struggle exemplifies Between the Acts’ concentrated camp, or serious humor, which aims to redeem Britain’s losses even as it anticipates the necessity of suffering in modern industrial society. Given its theatrical and country house settings, this affective mixture of camp and solemnity might seem natural; and indeed, as I finally argue, through its evolutionary rhetoric, Between positions queer feeling, not identity, as natural but unnaturalizable within the identitarian taxonomies with which queers themselves were grouped into concentration camps during the war. Specifically, even as the Nazis condemned queers to death for their degeneracy, Woolf finds that feeling degenerate—feeling low, melancholy, bestial, crude—offers wartime modernists the positive resources necessary for any affective response to the grave matter of war.
Exemplifying the novel’s catachrestic refrain—“the laughter died away,” where laughter and death seem perversely antithetical forces—Miss La Trobe realizes at text’s end that a reversion to the bare feelings of love and hate is the modern subject’s only affective option in the face of war. In this celebration of mirth and conflict, the novel’s affect resembles conventional definitions of camp humor, but that camp is more concentrated, one could say, more willing to bare the serious underbelly of its theatrical hilarity. Concentrated camp is thus a camp stripped down to its stark, naked, natural emotions, rather as atavism strips down the civilized trappings that Woolf aligns with both queer persecution and the theatre of war. Relying upon positivist theories of atavism, Between the Acts’ concentrated camp celebrates queer degeneracy and envisions a life for queer feeling, if not identity, beyond the catastrophic ends to which the Nazis put their eugenic use of positivism in World War II.
Alexandra Peat argues that The Voyage Out is concerned “with modes of seeing and methods of understanding,” and she insists that while these modes and methods require “frames, guides, and other forms of mediation,” Woolf intends to both “question and subvert the authenticity, or unifying power, of any one source of mediation.” Comparing The Voyage Out to A Room with a View, Peat says: “Woolf and Forster layer and juxtapose multiple avenues of experience. All of the characters in these novels, and, to some extent, the novels themselves, yearn to transcend the backgrounds and contexts that frame experience. Travel, through both space and time, offers the possibility of rupture that affords a release from the limitations of reality.”
In this paper, I am interested in exploring the connectedness among Virginia Woolf’s treatments of intimacy, musical performance, and musical appreciation in The Voyage Out, and the ways these treatments extend her examination of travel as a way of knowing and a source of pleasure. In a discussion of Roland Barthes’ claim that music “has an effect utterly different from sight” because “it can effect orgasm,” Felicia Miller Frank writes: &ldquo[P]leasure is not a specifically masculine property by any means; it is dual, hermaphroditic. The act of listening is not analogous to the gaze, assimilated in the Freudian system to phallic power. Listening must be both active and passive, since hearing implies a receptive state, a stance usually coded as feminine.” It is the issue of receptiveness that is at the center of my exploration here of intimacy. Woolf provides at least three essential scenes in The Voyage Out that focus on Rachel Vinrace’s piano playing in the presence of others: two that involve her fiancé Terence Hewet, and one at a dance that involves nearly all of the English visitors to Santa Marina. If Rachel’s desire for experience and knowledge prompt her to travel, I argue that it is her desire for intimacy that prompts her to perform -- but to perform that which is “valorized,” as Barthes claims, “precisely because of its immateriality.” Rachel gauges her levels of intimacy with others based upon their receptiveness to her piano playing, because the medium (her playing) and the receptiveness (others’ listening) come together for her inseparably and indivisibly beyond the world of material objects.
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