The early experimental short stories of
Virginia Woolf: From the language of
Impressionism to Post-Impressionist
forms?
Xavier Le Brun, Université d’Angers
Biography
Xavier Le Brun is a Lecturer at the University of Angers, specialising in modernist literature. His research interests include the self and interiority in the modernist period, the interactions between philosophy and literature and the modernist short story. He has recently contributed chapters to Excavating Modernity:
Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900-1930 (Routledge, 2019), La littérature et la vie (Classiques Garnier, 2018) and The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts (Presses
universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017).
Biographical line
Xavier Le Brun is a Lecturer at the University of Angers, specialising in modernist literature and the short story.
Abstract
This article examines the relevance of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as labels for Virginia Woolf’s early experimental writing. While Woolf’s intellectual and emotional proximity to Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell has prompted critics to draw a parallel between Post-Impressionism and her writing – something which is sustained by close readings of stories like “Kew Garden” and “The Mark on the Wall” – the literary agenda she sets out in “Modern Fiction” aligns her more closely with the tenets of Impressionism. This paradox is clarified when we turn to Laurent Jenny’s idea of a necessary disjunction between the theories formulated by writers and the literary works that supposedly embody them. But what this article ultimately hopes to demonstrate is that, although the Impressionism/Post-Impressionism dichotomy remains a valid tool through which to explore Woolf’s writings from the late 1910s, these texts are perhaps better understood as a “third way” between chaotic impression and significant form.
Résumé
Cet article examine la pertinence descriptive des catégories d’impressionnisme et de postimpressionnisme dans le contexte des premières expérimentations littéraires de Virginia Woolf. Si la proximité intellectuelle et affective de l’écrivaine avec Roger Fry et Vanessa Bell a conduit la critique à établir un parallèle entre ses écrits et le postimpressionnisme – proposition qu’une lecture attentive de nouvelles telles que « Kew Garden » et « The Mark on the Wall » permet de corroborer – le programme littéraire établi par Woolf dans « Modern Fiction » relève bien davantage d’une logique impressionniste. Ce paradoxe s’éclaire une fois pris en compte la thèse de Laurent Jenny sur la nécessaire disjonction entre les théories formulées par les écrivains et les œuvres censées leur faire pendant. Au-delà de cet argument, le présent article vise à démontrer que la fiction woolfienne de la fin des années 1910, bien qu’elle offre une prise certaine à la dichotomie impressionnisme / postimpressionnisme, gagne certainement à être conçue comme une « troisième voie » entre la forme signifiante et le chaos des impressions.
Virginia Woolf’s activity as a printer and publisher, as the head of the Hogarth Press, along with her husband Leonard, is well documented.1 A time-consuming occupation, printing is often described as a convenient diversion for Woolf whenever the strain imposed by writing became too difficult to bear. Although there is certainly a good deal of truth to this, operating the Hogarth Press was by no means a form of escapism. After all, for Woolf, who started out publishing her own texts,2 printing often amounted to a new ordeal, a new occasion to deal with creation and its torments. The entry in Woolf’s diary for May 12, 1919, unambiguously expresses the renewed fears experienced by the writer at the idea of issuing her own works, and the inevitable self-deprecation accompanying it:
We are in the thick of our publishing season; Murry, Eliot and myself are in the hands of the public this morning. For this reason, perhaps, I feel slightly but decidedly depressed. I read a bound copy of Kew Gardens through; having put off the evil task until it was complete. The result is vague. It seems to me slight and short; I don’t see how the reading of it impressed Leonard so much. According to him it is the best short piece I have done yet; and this judgment led me to read the Mark on the Wall and I found a good deal of fault with that. As Sydney Waterlow once said, the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise. I feel rather sure that I shall get none for this story; and I shall mind a little. (A Writer’s Diary 14)
This disposition is by no means exceptional in Woolf; as is evidenced by her diary and her letters, the process of publication always remained a painful one for her. What this passage foregrounds, however, is a form of circularity of the impression, or rather of various types of impressions. Indeed, the mechanical impression entailed by the printing of the work is synonymous, for Woolf, with the impression she is bound to make on the public (“the worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise”). This, in turn, is converted into the impression that the whole process leaves on her, one of dejection at first, and then of elation, as soon as the much-needed praise has been afforded her – as it happens, under the form of a laudatory review in The Times
Literary Supplement (A Writer’s Diary 15).
This circulation of impressions – one fuelling the other, the printing giving birth to a “readerly impression”, which consecutively sets the tone for the writer’s evaluation of her own texts and her subsequent creation of new works – would certainly be worth studying in itself. Nevertheless, the two texts mentioned by Woolf in her diary, “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”, published in 1917 and 1919 respectively – and which would later come to be comprised in the 1921 collection, Monday or Tuesday – are at the heart of another “impressionist” dilemma, one which has to do with the responses of writers and critics to the revolutionary developments of painting between the 1880s and the early modernist era. Indeed, “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”, which are among Woolf’s most well-known short stories, mark a radical departure from the technique and concerns of her previous fiction, a move which has long come to be attributed to the influence of modern French painting on Woolf, and particularly of Post-Impressionism. If we are to believe Ann Banfield, the “theory of modern fiction” developed in her essays from the late 1910s and early 1920s “has a visual dimension, taking the visual arts as its model of a modern art” (Banfield 52) and – through the mediation of art critic Roger Fry – taking Cézanne and the other Post-Impressionists as sources of inspiration. As we hope to demonstrate, this hypothesis, formulated by Banfield and many others, is supported by a close reading of both “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”. Things get more complicated, however, when we turn to “Modern Fiction”, the essay which is supposed to provide the backbone of Woolf’s thought on art and whose principles should thus be mirrored in the aesthetics of both short stories. Published the same year as “Kew Gardens” under the title “Modern Novels”, this essay, which would later be partially reworked and included in the first volume of The Common Reader, does not stand out as the expected Post-Impressionist manifesto and, although radical in its programme, does not quite seem the ideal companion-piece to “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”: as we intend to show, the guidelines set out in “Modern Fiction”, if followed scrupulously, would best serve the composition of Impressionist rather than Post-Impressionist
1 See for instance John H. Willis.
2 The first publication of the Hogarth Press, Two Stories (1917), comprised “The Mark on the Wall”, by Virginia, and “Three Jews”, by Leonard.
literary works. In order to account for this discrepancy between the principles enounced in the essay and their embodiment – or rather lack of embodiment – in Woolf’s contemporary short stories, we will take up the premise of Laurent Jenny’s discussion in La Fin de l’intériorité (The End of Interiority), i.e., the necessary disjunction between a manifesto and the corresponding literary production – a disjunction which Jenny argues is one of the most important driving forces in the evolution of art. We will also argue that the spirit of “Modern Fiction” and the innovations of “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” can be reconciled if we accept to see both the essay and the short stories, not as the receptacles for different theories of art applied to literature, but as Woolf’s own response to the Impressionist revolution – that is, neither Impressionism nor Post-Impressionism, but a new literary language suited to the needs and the desires of the Georgian writers, or the “spiritualists”, as Woolf calls them in “Modern Fiction”.
Before turning to “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” in order to appraise the Post-Impressionist influence that can be said to permeate both short stories, it may be useful to say a few words about Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the echo that both movements had on contemporary fiction. According to Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook,
[w]hat ultimately became important in pre-modernist painting [i.e. Impressionism] was not the representation of the object but the representation of the way the object may be perceived “in nature” (as independent of established artistic conventions). (Vargish and Mook 28)
Contrary to the academic painters that they sought to break away from, the Impressionists were interested in representing the world, not as they had been taught to represent it, but as it appeared to them. Manet, Pissarro or Monet endeavoured to recreate through the medium of paint, and as faithfully as possible, the visual impressions life “scores upon the consciousness” (“Modern Fiction” 150), to borrow a phrase from Woolf. Thus, Impressionism is inextricably linked to notions of perception and subjectivity. As Charles Harrison points out,
[i]n the 1870s the concept of art as “impression” was associated with a “modern” recognition of the inescapably subjective aspects of perception and experience. It was also associated with those stylistic characteristics in painting through which a personal and spontaneous vision was supposed to be expressed. An “impressionist” in this sense was one in whose work a certain informality of technique appeared to reveal a vision of the natural world which was both instantaneous and individual. (Harrison 144)
Inevitably, this reliance on the impression and “informality of technique” entailed the rejection of a good many accepted conventions: urban crowds became blurry and indistinct (Pissarro’s Boulevard des Italiens), light and atmospheric effects distorted shapes (Monet’s Houses of Parliament series). Moreover, some soon came to feel that Impressionism, through its effort to represent the world exactly as experienced, was actually forsaking an essential part of painting: its power not just to reproduce the visible world, but to organise it in a coherent and intellectually satisfying way. Roger Fry, the influential critic, was one of those, and as he recollects in Vision and Design:
After a brief period during which I was interested in the new possibilities opened up by the more scientific evaluation of colour which the Impressionists practised, I came to feel more and more the absence in their work of structural design. (Fry 190)
Post-Impressionism, a term coined by Fry on the occasion of the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition, which he organised in London in 1910 (Harrison 151), thus designates what for Fry is an attempt to overcome the lack of design inhering in the works of the Impressionists. In the words of Ann Banfield, Post-Impressionism – represented by artists such as Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin or Matisse – “goes beyond recording the data of experience. […] It organizes vision – color – via geometry, mathematics and logic” (Banfield 256, 257) so as to create a coherent space in which “a new and definite reality” (Fry 157) might be expressed.
Although Fry tends to picture the transition between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as a rather clear-cut break, with Cézanne as the main agent in the evolution from one conception of art to the other, this distinction should be handled cautiously. As Harrison points out, it does not so much reflect the artists’ own motives as it does the assumptions of a “dominant critical tradition” (Harrison 151) initiated by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Maurice Denis, Amédée Ozenfant or Julius Meier-Graefe. These artists and critics were the authors of
a distinct group of publications produced over a period of some twenty-five years in France, Germany, England and America, the common aim of which was to characterize and to proselytize a modern movement in art. (154)
Harrison pursues:
Each of these publications […] was concerned to propagandize a break with the past, each represented the distinctive character of modern art as the sign and the qualitative measure of an epochal change, each associated that character with an abandonment of naturalistic description and anecdote, each drew attention to the virtues of the “primitive”, and each accorded Cézanne a pivotal role. (154)
Rather than a movement initiated by the artists themselves, Post-Impressionism is thus revealed to be the product of “a partisan form of criticism,” a “system of beliefs about modernism in art,” which is in itself “an ideology of Modernism.” (154)
While there is no denying the problematic nature of Post-Impressionism as a partisan notion – which tends to downplay the artistic import of Impressionism by picturing it as a logical dead-end or simply a starting point for Cézanne’s innovations – the concept itself was immensely influential (154) and was certainly well accepted in Fry and Bell’s intellectual milieu, which is also Virginia Woolf’s. As a matter of fact, their influence on Woolf – and Fry’s in particular – almost amounts to a critical commonplace. Jane Goldman sums it up as follows:
The theory most often applied to Woolf is the theory of significant form, actually formulated first by Clive Bell, but close to Fry’s theory of pure form. Woolf’s ‘close intellectual relation with Fry’ and ‘their intimate friendship’ is typically emphasized: his conception of the novel as ‘a single perfectly organic aesthetic whole’, and his readiness to centre this within the comprehensive theory of Significant Form and the nature of perception itself gave Woolf the confidence to convert it all to her own artistic purposes. (Goldman 116)
Consequently, and perhaps because Woolf herself took it for granted that “[a]ll great writers are great colourists” (“Walter Sickert: A Conversation” 44), she has frequently been analysed as a Post-Impressionist writer, whose “project is […] to find a language with the powers of Cézanne’s painting” (Banfield 296). But a problem already becomes manifest here: in spite of the comparison with Cézanne, Post-Impressionism fails to register either as a literary school or as an established critical category referring to a recognisable group of writers. “Literary Impressionism,” on the other hand, can pass as both. While Woolf never called herself a Post-Impressionist, Ford Madox Ford – although he “claim[ed] no Papacy in the matter” (Ford 34) – did with his essay “On Impressionism” give “some notes towards a working guide to Impressionism as a literary method.” (33) Along with Ford, Henry James and Joseph Conrad “increasingly defined themselves in terms of impressionism, and have increasingly been so defined by recent criticism.” (Saunders 261) And indeed, a number of commentators, among whom were John G. Peters, Jesse Matz and Saunders himself, have reflected on the nature and characteristics of literary Impressionism. According to Peters, who is careful not to define
them as simple emulators of the techniques of Impressionist painting – i.e. practitioners of a discontinuous or hazy form of writing –,3
literary impressionists sought to represent phenomena as they filter through a single human consciousness at a certain point in space and time such that the resulting representation is one of individual rather than universal experience. (Peters 34)
Within Impressionism, both artistic and literary, “subject and object are linked, and their relationship is uniquely contextualized – an individual experience that connects subject, object, and surrounding circumstances in an interdependent event.” (17-18)
But what about literary Post-Impressionism? Admittedly, it has yet to emerge as a field of inquiry, having been eclipsed entirely by discussions on Impressionism in literature.4 As a result, although Woolf’s prose is commonly related to Fry’s theorising and Cézanne’s painting, she is just as often classified as a literary Impressionist, in the same vein as Ford, Conrad or Proust. By 1932, Woolf’s method was branded as “psychological impressionism” (“impressionnisme psychologique”) by Floris Delattre (Delattre 169), and similar judgments can be found among the contemporary critics. While Peters regards her writing as too much on the subjective side of the subject-object relationship to be labelled Impressionist (Peters 18), Matz clearly sees a literary Impressionist in Woolf, one who aimed at “rendering life as it really seemed to individual subjective experience” (Matz 13). We are therefore facing what amounts to a critical paradox: when studied on its own or in relation with Bloomsbury influences, Woolf’s fiction lends itself to the Post-Impressionist comparison. Critics who work on the larger issue of modernism and painting, however, tend to neglect this line of inquiry in favour of the better-established and more easily recognisable category of literary Impressionism.
Nevertheless, this paradox might be resolved, I would argue, if we consider that what critics such as Matz refer to as “literary Impressionism” is actually a larger heading than what might appear at first, and that although Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are opposed in the realm of arts, literary Impressionism in fact proves to be an inclusive category, one flexible enough to accommodate forms of writing that not only rely on the subject-object relationship described by Peters, but that seek to go beyond its immediate outcome. In Matz’s definition, literary Impressionism is revealed to be a quest for the essence of things (175), more akin to Cézanne’s endeavour than to Monet’s or Pissarro’s. Literary Impressionism, according to Matz, is not simply an effort to represent the world as experienced by an embodied subject, it is the articulation between fleeting sensory perceptions and the deeper sense of reality to which they give access:
The literary Impressionists meant that fiction should locate itself where we “have an impression”: not in sense, nor in thought, but in the feeling that comes between; not in the moment that passes, nor in the decision that lasts, but in the intuition that lingers. If “fiction is an impression” it mediates opposite perceptual moments. It does not choose surfaces and fragments over depths and wholes but makes surfaces show depths, makes fragments suggest wholes, and devotes itself to the undoing of such distinctions.
To get in the impression not just sense perception but sense that is thought, appearances that are real, suspicions that are true and parts that are whole – this was the “total” aspiration of the Impressionist writer. (1)
3 “Confusion concerning literary impressionism causes some critics to draw too close a tie between the techniques of the visual and literary arts, while others fail to identify the nature of impressionist epistemology itself. Contrary to most commentary, I would argue that any similarities between impressionist art and literature result from similarities in philosophy – not technique.” (Peters 14)
4 In a way, this is only logical: the notion of literary Impressionism in itself, imported from the visual arts, already demands critical justification. To refer to something like literary Post-Impressionism, in this context, only amounts to further complexifying a thorny issue.
Formulated in this way, literary Impressionism takes on attributes that actually resemble those of a literary
Post-Impressionism. The opposition foregrounded by Roger Fry in the field of visual arts is, thus, subsumed
in literature within Impressionism as an encompassing category.
The apparent contradiction having been resolved, let us now focus on how the Post-Impressionist influence manifests itself in Woolf’s experiments with fiction of the late 1910s. For Julia Briggs, who insists that Woolf “held Fry’s opinions in the greatest respect and wanted to integrate them into her own artistic practice and adapt them to her own developing theories of aesthetics,” “Kew Gardens” stands somehow as a landmark as it represents “Woolf’s first formalist fiction.” (Briggs 97, 102) Briggs reads the short story as a series of binary oppositions, echoes and analogies through which a logical form, or structure is progressively constructed. Indeed, “Kew Gardens” might be said to be organised on the model of a Post-Impressionist painting, shifting between different points of view, just as Cézanne combined different perspectives in an effort to produce “a taut and continuously interesting unity of form.” (Vargish and Mook 32) Located at the focal centre of the story, the “oval-shaped flower-bed” (A Haunted House 84) the narrative voice regularly reverts to serves as a pivot organising the rest of the narrative. Around it and its animal occupant, a snail whose laborious progress through fallen leaves and dirt is scrupulously recorded, revolve a series of passers-by alternately singled out for description by the narrative voice: first a couple, Simon and Eleanor, and their children, then an old man lost in obscure ravings and his younger companion, “two elderly women of the lower middle class,” (87) and finally a young couple dazzled by the world of new sensations the garden offers them. “Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green-blue vapour.” (89)
The story, alternating between the different groups and carefully balancing their respective thoughts, longings and considerations, thus proceeds according to a “dual seeing” (Banfield 251) whereby the visible, empirical reality is shown to rest on a framework of parallels and oppositions lending it its own particular coherence: “[f]irst the look of the world is registered; then its non-visual structure brought to light.” (251) Thus, the first page of “Kew Gardens” introduces us to a middle-aged couple lost in memories of previous visits to the garden, a configuration mirrored by the end of the story, which again foregrounds a couple – only this time “they were both young, a young man and a young woman.” (A Haunted House 88) And instead of reminiscing about their past, this second couple marvel at the strange new possibilities and implications that seem to lie behind each sight or word. The symmetrical opposition, although purely formal in nature, yields meaning to the story in general, allowing it to achieve a sense of balance and harmony, which itself rests on an unspoken intimation of life’s cyclicality. In “Kew Gardens” as in Woolf’s later novels “[t]he shifting of perspectives, like the shuttle of a loom, creates the network of logical relations, the fabric of a world.” (Banfield 350) “The Mark on the Wall,” although it presents the reader with a single perspective instead of a collection of different points of view, similarly lends itself to a Post-Impressionist reading. In this earlier short story, Woolf uses the mysterious mark on the wall much as she will use the flower-bed in “Kew Gardens,” and even the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse – that is, as a formal device destined to structure the text through its recurrence. The mark – whose cause or origin the narrator of the story intermittently speculates about – serves to weave together this narrator’s otherwise relatively disjointed chain of thought. The story thus intermingles considerations as diverse as the fall of Troy, Shakespeare and the private life of antiquaries with the recurrent interrogation as to the nature of the mark on the wall. This way, Woolf “twists Impressionist vagueness into form” (352) – she creates a general outline out of a chaotic material.
“Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” thus seem to stand as evidence of Woolf’s engagement with Post-Impressionism – and with the possibility it offered for literature – in the late 1910s. As is made manifest by a rapid scrutiny of both short stories, Woolf had found a source of inspiration she could tap into in order to fuel her own quest for form in fiction in Fry and Bell’s theories about art. Consequently, it is tempting to look for further evidence of the connection in “Modern Fiction,” the essay in which Woolf lays out the principles according to which she intends to rejuvenate her art, and which happens to be the immediate contemporary of
“Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall.” To a certain extent, this is what Ann Banfield does, drawing on the name of the essay to designate Woolf’s own fuller theory of art and calling this “modern fiction” “the Post-Impressionism of writing.” (52) For Banfield, “Modern fiction’s goal […] is to find a language to relate the two realities [of impressions and formal structure], endowing both with a new reality.” (158) However, although later documents seem to clarify Woolf’s own formal approach to literature and its debt to Fry,5 “Modern Fiction” itself can hardly be called a Post-Impressionist manifesto. In it, Woolf develops a logic that is heavily reminiscent of the Impressionists’ refusal of artistic conventions and desire to represent life as lived – but she does not go so far as to suggest, in a Post-Impressionist fashion, that impressions should be channelled into a coherent structure or “significant form.”
Woolf, in “Modern Fiction,” advocates “[f]idelity to the authentic and subjective impression,” seeing it as “a condition of […] modernity” (Harrison 146), just as the Impressionists had. Her main criticism against the previous generation of writers, represented by Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells – the “materialists” (“Modern Fiction” 147) – is that “[l]ife escapes” (149) from their books, by which she means that they do not represent anything lived or felt in a truly idiosyncratic way, but instead spend their time adhering to facts and unimportant considerations designed to prove “the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story.” (149) By contrast, writers of her own generation
attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. (150)
Woolf is thus close to the Impressionists in that she refuses to partake in barren traditions (150) – the “two and thirty chapters,” the plot, comedy, tragedy and “love interest” (149) –, which she feels have nothing to do with the true business of fiction. Instead, she famously calls for her reader to “[l]ook within” and “[e]xamine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” (149) What she asks of the novel is not to look like a novel, but somehow to be similar to a mind at work, ready to record the “myriad impressions” of life, the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms.” (150)
Most importantly, Woolf does not suggest that this process of recording the impressions should be supplemented by other, more constrictive, guiding lines: on the contrary, the atoms of sensation should be registered “as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” (150) thereby suggesting that the essential task of the writer is not to organise, but to transcribe impressions. “[I]f a writer,” she observes, “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.” (150) In other words, there would be none of the usual props writers have traditionally turned to as organisational devices with a view to strengthening the coherence of their narrative. Woolf decisively aligns herself in the same position as the French Impressionists and refutes the necessity to make more sense of the sensations than is already contained in them. Such a position, articulated in 1919, almost a decade after Roger Fry had introduced Post-Impressionism and its tenets to Britain, stands radically at odds with the latter’s views on the subject and especially with the demand for “design” he phrases so consistently. We find no trace in “Modern Fiction” of the “purposeful order” Fry saw in Cézanne and his successors, that order “without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed.” (Fry 20, 19) Judging the essay from Fry’s criteria, Woolf is still engaged in “Modern Fiction” in “the fervid pursuit of naturalistic representation” (192) which the Impressionists refined almost to perfection through their effort to conform their art to their perceptions.
“Modern Fiction,” whose close proximity with “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” makes it their natural companion piece and theoretical complement, therefore actually promotes a mode of writing which is
5 In a letter of 1924 to Fry, Woolf writes “I’m puzzling, in my weak witted way, over some of your problems: about ‘form’ in literature. I’ve been writing about Percy Lubbock’s book, and trying to make out what I mean by form in fiction. I say it is emotion put into the right relations; and has nothing to do with form as used of painting. But this you must tidy up for me when we meet, which must be soon and often.” (A Change of Perspective: Collected Letters III 133)
not only opposed to the Post-Impressionist quest for design, but which apparently runs contrary to Woolf’s strategy in these two stories. In a way, – and although both essays are vastly different in tone as well as in arguments – Woolf is closer in “Modern Fiction” to Ford’s “On Impressionism” than to the Conrad of the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. For Conrad, whose views on art seem to anticipate the theorising of Post-Impressionism by a good ten years,
art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential – their one illuminating and convincing quality – the very truth of their existence. (Conrad 3)
Max Saunders, commenting on this passage, is struck by what he identifies as a paradox: “impressionism is supposed to concentrate on the visible world. But it does this in order to get at something that cannot be perceived visually: the ‘truth’ ‘underlying’ the ‘visible universe’.” (Saunders 267) But of course such proposition only stands out as a paradox if one starts from the premise that Conrad’s philosophy of art is an Impressionist one. As soon as we leave behind that assumption, however, we realise that the aim Conrad sets for art is actually the same as the Post-Impressionists: “First the look of the world is registered; then its non-visual structure is brought to light.” (Banfield 251) In an ironic reversal of the movement that occurred in the visual arts, Post-Impressionism in literature – at least in a theoretical or propositional form – seems to have predated some of the great manifestos of literary Impressionism, so that Woolf’s experimental stories of the late 1910s apparently echo the principles of Conrad’s preface more closely than those of “Modern Fiction.” The question, however, remains: how can we reconcile the underlying order that is present in both “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” with the desire, voiced by Woolf, to index fiction on impression? How can we reconcile the call for a loose and flexible form with the carefully structured and balanced narratives that were being crafted during the same period? Certainly, if the author of “Modern Fiction” had carried out the programme she set up for herself and her contemporaries to the letter, then “The Mark on the Wall” would have been reduced to the confused musings of its narrator while “Kew Gardens” would not have displayed such formal harmony. In La Fin de l’Intériorité, Jenny tackles such discrepancies between theoretical works and the fiction which supposedly embodies their principles.
According to Jenny – who is interested in the evolution of the idea of literature within the French avant-gardes between the 1880s and the 1930s – the different conceptions of literature formulated at different times in prefaces, essays or manifestos rarely coincide with the texts they are meant to defend or which support them. One example that he develops is the case of free verse and interior monologue. Both techniques sprung from Symbolism and its assumption that literature should express the innermost self of the author. (Jenny 33-34) However, both partially contradict the Symbolist ideal: by laying bare the psychic life of characters, the interior monologue gives birth to a world of pure thought, a world without any exteriority, and thus any possibility for the self to actually be “expressed.” (42-43) As for free verse, it was supposed to embody the prevalence given by Symbolism to music. According to Jenny, however, the real innovation brought about by free verse is spatial, not musical, in nature and has to do with the possibilities opened by the visual arrangement of words on the page, something which Mallarmé would have recourse to with Un Coup de dés jamais
n’abolira le hasard (58-59). The discrepancy between theoretical assumptions on the one hand and actual
texts and techniques on the other is a product, Jenny argues, of the literary works themselves: unlike essays, fiction is not meant first to express ideas. As a result, it always does more than just that, or does it differently from what was expected. The gap that results between idea and practice is the real drive behind literary history for Jenny – it is the very historical principle within literature, enabling ideas and conceptions to evolve through their confrontation with empirical forms and techniques. (12)
Virginia Woolf’s post-war short stories surely contribute to the exemplification of Jenny’s model: evolved from the Impressionist ideal of “Modern Fiction,” (although the essay itself was first published two years after “The Mark on the Wall”) they endow it with an organisational principle which it did not intrinsically call for. In the passage between theory and practice, Woolf covers the distance between Impressionist logic and Post-Impressionist language for herself. The chronological precedence of “The Mark on the Wall” over “Modern Fiction” makes the “evolution” all the more striking – as if the essay, in its attempt at definition, could only grasp for what fiction had already intuited and would later come to express fully. This line of explanation, by rationalising the hiatus between theory and art, discourse and practice, does offer a certain hold on their apparent contradiction.
Nevertheless, one could also argue that the contradiction only becomes manifest within the interpretative framework of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, two affiliations Woolf never explicitly claimed for herself, although their respective logics seem to weigh strongly on her post-war experiments with fiction. If considered independently from the binary opposition between one movement and the other, “Modern Fiction” and the short stories from 1917-1919 lend themselves to a completely different reading – one in which the lessons of Impressionism are shown to be similarly absorbed by Woolf in her essay and fiction. What we hope to show is that, although the dichotomy of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism remains a valid tool to explore Woolf’s writings from the late 1910s, these texts are perhaps better understood as a coherent and personal response to the shortcomings of Impressionism – in other words, as a “third way” between chaotic impression and significant form.
In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf stresses the paramount importance of subjective impressions, as opposed to stereotyped plotlines and the “air of probability” (“Modern Fiction” 149) Edwardian writers strove so hard to achieve. As we have mentioned previously, the necessity to record impressions is not accompanied by the imperative to arrange them in any particular sequence or shape. The risk run by Woolf is, therefore, of transmuting fiction into an Impressionistic chaos, one in which Roger Fry would undoubtedly regret the absence of “formal design” (Fry 192) or “purposeful order.” (20) This does not mean, however, that “Modern Fiction” falls prey to the same peril as befell the Impressionists according to Fry. Indeed, the theory that Woolf develops in the essay is not without its own safeguards against formlessness, the principal one being its recurrent pairing of the ordinary and the incongruous, of familiarity and incoherence. This association, which runs all throughout “Modern Fiction,” in fact permits Woolf to compensate for the absence of overall design or pattern her theory might be suspected to suffer from.
As we have pointed out previously, Woolf’s concern in the essay is with “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” (150) However, “Modern Fiction” consistently balances familiarity against disorientation:6 “the life of Monday or Tuesday,” far from offering the appearance of tranquillity, is akin to a bewildering shower of atoms, its essence is “varying,” “unknown,” “uncircumscribed.” (150) “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” it is “a luminous halo,” (150) hazy and somehow outlandish. What Woolf implies then, is that the closer we get to “the proper stuff of fiction” (150) – to life itself – the deeper we reach into an extraordinary world whose extreme proximity with us has rendered inconspicuous. As a consequence, any attempt at a genuine transcription of life is bound to bring out the paradoxical strangeness and lack of recognisable order permeating the most commonplace events or circumstances. The “pattern […] which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” inevitably appears “disconnected and incoherent,” Woolf admits, but she also demands, “[i]s it not the task of the novelist to convey this […] spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display […]?” (150) Joyce, as a true representative of the new “spiritual” fiction Woolf advocates, does not shy away from such complexities and, therefore, “disregards […] probability, or coherence,” so long as it can help him “reveal” and “preserve” the most banal yet essential dimension of life:
6 The importance of the everyday and the ordinary in Woolf has now long been recognised. See for instance Lorraine Sim (Virginia
Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience), Liesl M. Olson (“Virginia Woolf’s ‘cotton wool of daily life’”) or Chiara Briganti
(“Giving the Mundane its Due: One (Fine) Day in the Life of the Everyday”). The recurrent association of the ordinary with the unfamiliar, however, has not received the same degree of critical attention.
“the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.” (151) What remains to be clarified, however, is the extent to which this mixture of familiarity and incoherence provides an effective answer to the formlessness that Fry denounced as the main shortcoming of Impressionism.
In the first instance, it might be argued that the simple acknowledgment by Woolf of a haphazard element within the reality aimed at by fiction tends to justify this disorder or incoherence by turning it into a logical and necessary component of her theory of modern fiction. Rather than being a “side effect” of art’s new fidelity to the impression, formlessness appears as its legitimate foundation and is thus “redeemed” – at least from a logical point of view. Moreover – and this is the decisive point – through the association of ordinariness and lack of coherence, Woolf creates a pattern, a leitmotif that will help shape and structure the work of fiction. In itself, the pairing of familiarity and strangeness, the defamiliarization of everyday life, becomes form, order, or design; its very recurrence makes it an element of stability within fiction. Of course this stability rests on a paradox: whereas Fry or Bell look for structure in various organisational principles – and thus, in the subduing of confusion – Woolf finds order within chaos. Proliferation and disorganisation become meaningful through their being systematically balanced against the everyday and the familiar. A new form is born in the confrontation between these seemingly antagonistic forces: Woolf’s own “Post-Impressionism,” her own taming of the impression.
Moreover, such a logic is neither a vain wish, nor an abstract program destined to be altered or adapted as soon as it is embodied in a given literary production. If we turn to “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens,” we find that both of these stories precisely rely on the association of familiarity and incoherence hinted at in “Modern Fiction.” From this point of view, there is no longer any discrepancy between theory and practice, between essay and fiction: both locate form within the potentially destabilising effects of incoherence. “Kew Gardens,” for instance, presents the reader with several fragments taken from the lives of ordinary individuals: characters stroll by the flower-bed, each with his or her own story, memories and aspirations. Nothing, at first glance, intervenes to disrupt the comforting flow of ordinary existence. For all that, the impression of familiarity could hardly be said to prevail. Indeed, once isolated and meticulously studied, everyday life, cut off from the background or the “air of probability” (“Modern Fiction” 149) that usually sustains it, acquires an almost disquieting quality. The description of the flower-bed in the first paragraph, for instance, reaches such a degree of precision, especially in the evocation of light flowing on the petals and altering colours, that Woolf’s reader inevitably feels transported to a surprising and peculiar world, one devoid of the stable points of reference he or she might have expected.
The dialogue between Eleanor and Simon, whose visit to the garden leads them to reminisce about their past, similarly brings us into such close contact with the intimacy of both characters that the plunge into their consciousness functions as a defamiliarising journey. Although they dwell on seemingly trite details – a past romance, a memory from childhood – the immediacy as well as the great precision of these experiences serve to highlight their idiosyncratic quality and, thus, their potentially disorienting effects. The best example of this particular logic of defamiliarisation is probably found in the talk of the “two elderly women of the lower middle class” (A Haunted House 87): instead of reproducing the exact detail of their conversation, Woolf somehow “contracts” it, keeping only the most salient words, so as to introduce a sense of strangeness and incoherence within an essentially banal and prosaic dialogue:
‘Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says –’ ‘My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,
Sugar, flour, kippers, greens, Sugar, sugar, sugar.’ (87)
Once again, the everyday is rendered unfamiliar. Through the loss of an effective grammatical framework, language itself is foregrounded and simple chatter reaches the evocative density of poetry. The last paragraph of the story achieves a similar effect, although this time the distortion of the ordinary is visual, or spatial, rather than linguistic:
Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green-blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! (89)
The description of the couples fading out of sight in the hot afternoon, with its insistence on colours, its calm elusiveness and vaporous quality, is undoubtedly evocative of the dissolving contours and outdoor scenes that often characterise Impressionist paintings. Unlike many such paintings, however, this last scene functions as part of a larger whole and inevitably resonates with the rest of the short story:7 by recalling other instances of the “bizarre” nature of ordinary impressions, it helps delineate a pattern that runs throughout the story. It is this formal backbone that simultaneously foregrounds subjective perception and checks the flow of impressions, thereby helping the story achieve balance.
The other short story we have been alluding to, “The Mark on the Wall,” functions in much the same way. Its subject matter is commonplace enough: an unidentified mark whose mystery troubles the narrator and sets her or him on a trail of questions and suppositions. Is the mark a nail? (77), “a small rose leaf” (78), “a smooth tumulus” (80), “a crack in the wood” (82)? Through the accumulation of hypotheses, each failing to provide a definitive answer, the mystery of the mark paradoxically deepens, and what at first appeared a benign investigation turns into an endless questioning – one that actually seems to feed upon itself. The ontological status of the mark becomes more unstable with every new metamorphosis, so that its apparent triviality is soon replaced with a sense of bewilderment. There is even a certain perversity in that the first hypothesis voiced by the narrator as to the nature of the mark (a nail) only misses its object by one letter – the mark is indeed revealed at the end of the story to be a snail –, so that from that point onward, the rest of the questioning will only drift farther away from the truth. Just as in “Kew Gardens,” however, the unfamiliarity revealed to lie at the core of the most banal situations or objects is precisely what lends the story its general coherence: as the mark becomes increasingly enigmatic, the process of defamiliarisation appears as the main structural rhythm in “The Mark on the Wall.” Accumulated hypotheses obscure and complexify the narrative, but they also punctuate it and give it its distinctive form.
As Jenny convincingly argues, “in literature, ‘forms’ and ‘ideas’ do not transparently match.” (“Il n’y a pas transparence entre ‘idées’ et ‘formes’ littéraires;” Jenny 12) As such, reading “Modern Fiction” as an Impressionist work, while Woolf’s contemporary short stories would more closely reflect the principles of Post-Impressionism is not, in itself, indicative of a lack of consistency in her artistic endeavour. On the contrary, the conflict is what allows Woolf’s project to fully realise itself by confronting ideas with their necessary embodiment within fiction. But what this inevitable dialectic of theory and practice also tells us is that labels, such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, cannot effectively embrace the totality of Woolf’s artistic process. In navigating the immediacy of impression and its meticulous ordering and balancing, Woolf goes beyond any binary opposition and is revealed to be neither exactly an Impressionist nor a Post-Impressionist, but an initiator of new forms – one who, at the close of the 1910s, finds a personal language in the complex pairing of the ordinary and the unfamiliar, one that allows her to channel the impression without necessarily aligning herself with the entire body of theoretical assumptions behind Post-Impressionism.
7 Impressionism also typically associates ordinary scenes and their apparent defamiliarisation. However, this effect primarily yields form and pattern through its repetition, as in a narrative, something which in painting is mainly achieved through the composition of a series of works (for instance Monet’s Water Lilies, or his Rouen Cathedral series).
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Xavier Le Brun, Université d’Angers
