Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Virginia Woolf’ category

more on The Voyage Out

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Although I mentioned in my earlier post that The Voyage Out was similar to a typical coming-of-age novel, let me give that idea a bit more nuance by tracing the storyline for a moment. In pure story, my statement is true – young Rachel accompanies her aunt and uncle on a journey to South America and in the course of that journey she falls in love and comes to understand one of the great mysteries of life, namely, what will society and what will one man in particular expect from her as she makes the transition from childhood to adulthood.

On the surface of things, this is timeless literary fare. But this is also Virginia Woolf and I think it is the details, the specific Woolfian twist, that makes all the difference.

First, the characters are all very close to being eccentric, without being exactly so.  They are almost types: Mr. Ambrose the doddering erudite scholar, the young, unfinished Rachel, Mrs. Ambrose the wise older woman, and Hirst, the pompous academic. There are many, many more. But then each is endowed with such particular, distinct, and sometimes bizarre thinking.

And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?

She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions.

Woolf allows her characters to meander and wonder, to question their reality. So much so that their reflections on the state of their world begin to undermine the novel’s seemingly traditional structure. As the story unravels, it starts to become quite clear that this isn’t just Rachel’s story at all. It is everyone’s story, and although each of their stories may not get equal weight, each of their given moments are equally weighty.

And then Woolf upends everything with a final, jarring twist. I think this was the aspect of The Voyage Out that I most enjoyed. Just as I was getting comfortable with Woolf’s wonderfully different version of a young woman’s coming-of-age, she takes that away and offers a radical and almost completely unexpected* alternative. Suddenly, the book is about everything but Rachel. Very clever. All those searching questions become more relevant.

I am coming to realize that this Woolf project will not really ever be complete until I’ve read these novels several times. I’m only just ready to begin Night and Day, and already I want to go back and reread The Voyage Out to catch all that I missed. But all things in their order…I’ll get there, it may just take a few years.

*The foreshadowing about what will eventually happen to Rachel is excellent. It happens about a hundred pages before the end, and it comes from the perspective of Mrs. Ambrose. Although it is pretty high-handed, Mrs. Ambrose is given to extreme thinking so it doesn’t necessarily overwhelm the reader. And it is one of the novel’s most poetic moments.

Woolf's 1915 Diary

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I’ve started reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary. I am struck by and thankful for her ordinary-ness. She records all the necessary boring bits about life. That is rather refreshing. Of course, she does wind her way to lovely reflections like this:

I know that with the first chink of light in the hall and chatter of voices I should become intoxicated and determine that life held nothing comparable to a party. I should see beautiful people and get a sensation of being on the highest crest of the biggest wave – right in the centre and swim of things.

Or this:

There is a foreign look about a town which stands up against the sunset, and is approached by a much trodden footpath across a field.

The first quote reminds me of her writing, the energy of it. And I suspect as she wrote the sentence, she was no longer writing in her diary. It just has a different feel than her other jottings. And the second is simple, but it strikes me as a fine example of her skill for unique observation.

I tried to read Sylvia Plath’s diary once, (at least I think it was Sylvia Plath…I may be wrong, but this was over ten years ago) and was instantly put off because it read like a novel. It was so perfectly shaped and “written”, with long passages of dialogue and actual scenes. It didn’t feel like a diary at all.

But Woolf’s diary is exactly that. A record for each day of what she did, who she saw, her thoughts and little snippets of conversations. It isn’t at all intimidating. It’s wonderful such a record of her life exists.

I’ve just come across the only mention (in her 1915 diary) of her first novel The Voyage Out. She writes:

We talked about my novel (which everyone, so I predict, will assure me is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever read, and privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned.

I am very curious if she ever mentions this novel again in any of her later diaries. Why so severe on herself? A considerable amount of time had passed since the novel was accepted for publication and then actually saw publication…is that what made her think it was bad? Or was she always this severe with all of her writing? And did she really mean it?

Initial thoughts on The Voyage Out

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I like reading authors from start to finish, beginning with their early works and moving forward in sequence. There are other ways to get to know a writer, I suppose, and it’s tempting even to work backwards or just go at random, and then let the different works speak to another. I suspect there would be some fascinating bridges and parallels to be found. But I am obstinately compelled to begin at the beginning and turn those pages until I get to the end.

And so my Virginia Woolf project begins with her first novel The Voyage Out, published in 1915. I won’t be able to get through this book in one post, and I think it would be a mistake, an injustice even, to attempt to do that. So I’ll begin here with some scribbling and impressions.

First, it was both lighter and heavier than I expected. By lighter, I mean that it reminded me of many novels written in the late 1800’s, society novels, in which people travel and interact with lots of other people, in which couples are formed and broken, in which small events string together with sometimes haphazard connection but still manage to race toward an ending. And by heavier, I mean that mixed up within all these conversations and events and people was a fascinating, profound, eccentric and insightful contemplation of a wide variety of people. What they think, how they feel, what they want.

The Voyage Out is preoccupied with existential questions – does all of this meeting and chatting and loving really matter? The story attempts to answer some of those questions, others it leaves hanging, and to nice effect.

Second, what a narrator! What incredible narrative control and authority. Perhaps it impressed me so much because contemporary fiction seems to have abandoned this kind of omniscient third person, but the skill with which Woolf explodes a moment into multiple levels of thinking, layering each character’s thoughts on top of another, is a true pleasure to read. Not to mention how well she differentiates between each character by their thinking. Each person is allowed truly exceptional thoughts, but they are tailored to the individual.

And finally, although I think the last statement I wrote is true, I also think that many of Woolf’s characters, perhaps the more important ones to the story, share one quality that I believe comes from Woolf’s own unique approach to the world…a recognition that perception, insight and awareness are double-edged strengths. On the one hand, this kind of sensitivity makes a person more alive to his or her surroundings, more receptive, but on the other, that state of being receptive involves a certain rawness, it makes a perceived sensation/intuition both revolutionary and painful.

I did so much underlining in The Voyage Out, and I’m not quite sure where I want to begin further discussion. I loved the book, for several different reasons, and I want to sort those out before writing again.

tuesday reading notes

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I finished up the last third of Anne Bragance’s Une Succulente au fond de l’impasse and it didn’t radically change my earlier impression of the book. Overall, very disappointing. But I am interested in several other Bragance titles and hope to find something on the same level as Casus Belli among her other books.

In the light of the current upheaval in publishing, I’m curious how this sort of thing continues to happen. I mean, how does a book this blah get published? Who is the lazy editor that doesn’t say, look, this needs some re-thinking, before publication? Bragance is an accomplished writer; I would assume she could handle it. I don’t think this is an issue of my reading in the wrong genre, or missing some deeply interesting or mysterious element of the book. (For what it’s worth, my entire book group agrees the book failed, so it isn’t just me and even if that’s only six people, we rarely come to such easy accord.) The book is touted as serious literary fiction but it reads like a first draft, or three first drafts. If it was meant to be three interconnected novellas, Bragance fails to work both the form and the stories to a satisfying conclusion. The three parts of the novel don’t speak to each other, except on a very superficial level. And as I mentioned before, the three first-person narrators could have all been the exact same person.

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The following most excellent and eloquent essay has been (s)linking around the web these days. The essay is on translation and written by Harvard University Press Editor Sharmila Sen. This bit will stay with me:

A translation is the original text’s wife. If too pretty, the translation must be cheating on her husband, the text. If faithful, the translation must not be very pretty.

I love that. And it was a timely sentence for me to read as I struggle with getting Ramuz into English. I recently got a disappointing rejection from a journal where an intern wrote, “I liked the French but the translation did not work”. Ouch. In the particular story I submitted, there were three POV shifts, a relatively unheard of use of a pronoun that doesn’t exist in English, unsettling shifts in tense and I won’t even go into Ramuz’s obsessional use of semi-colons. So, yes, she’s completely right, the translation doesn’t “work”. And maybe my translation fell short of resolving those issues so I’m more than willing to get back to the two texts and see what I can do to. But this is the struggle with translation…how to recreate/reflect the eccentricity of Ramuzian French in English to an Anglophone reader? I’ll just keep trying…

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My Virginia Woolf project is gaining momentum. I tucked into two of her earliest short stories over the weekend – Phyllis and Rosamond and The Mysterious Case of Miss V.  Phyllis and Rosamond is a detailed portrait of two women as well as a discussion of types. The story tosses the idea of freedom around, personal and intellectual freedom, amidst a discussion of marriage expectations. I won’t go into detail about The Mysterious Case of Miss V. because it was more abstract and less easy to describe, but it struck me while reading both stories that Woolf understood what the coming of modernity would mean for women, both the positives and the negatives, and already in her early work, she was trying to sort out the impending muddle.

And also, a small point, but I’m noticing how Woolf has several of her characters conflate hard, solid facts with the idea of comfort. It is a strange pairing. Yet emotions must have been shifting, unreliable things to get a grip on for someone like Woolf while facts were fixed, and dependable.  Comforting.

Woolf Project begins – The Voyage Out

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The Voyage Out, a fitting title to launch my Virginia Woolf read this year. And I do feel as if I’ve set out on a journey to discover and observe Virginia Woolf’s imagination and way of thinking. As I mentioned last week, her prose is so wonderfully distinctive that stepping into her fictional universe is quite an immersion. This is my first time reading The Voyage Out, and it’s Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915, but it contains many of the elements that would go on to become her signature style.

This is interesting to me – all writers develop and explore new fictional, thematic and stylistic territory but not all writers are so immediately and recognizably distinctive. Of course she had been writing for a long time already by then, and her upbringing was decidedly literary and artistic.

One of the more interesting aspects of this project for me is that I find myself, for almost the first time, wanting to know as much as possible about the writer’s life as I begin to experience the writing. I’m usually mostly interested in the work and what it does, how it affects me as a reader and writer, and ultimately, what the experience of reading it feels like. But with Woolf, there is a feeling that everything she wrote was intimately connected with who she was as a person, what her mind was processing and what happened to her on a day to day basis. Her “work”, as it were, is also “her.” Why I feel this way about Woolf compared to many other authors is something I’m going to have think about further as the project develops.

I am just about halfway through The Voyage Out. If I am allowed to use the term without belittling the work, this is very much a “coming-of-age” novel. And it is also highly reminiscent of a 19th century society novel in structure, except it is exceptionally modern in its preoccupation. What I mean by that is, that although the story of Rachel’s journey to South America and subsequent adventures follows a similar script of say an Austen, an Elliot or a Burney, it is much more intimately concerned with exploring questions about identity and existence and intelligence. One of the novel’s greatest questions seems to be: What are women really thinking? Why are they thinking it? Is it as worthwhile as what men are thinking?

Finally, just a general comment as I settle in to her writing. There is a thickness to her prose that I love, a layering of understanding and insight with respect to each of her characters and the setting in which they find themselves. She draws out her characters’ eccentricities but also the part of each individual that is fragile, and it is usually this fragility that manages to bring them into connection with each other.

I’ll finish here with a quote I think all readers will enjoy, taken from a scene in which Rachel is reading:

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

Virginia Woolf – The Mark on the Wall

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The other day I wrote that reading The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf compelled me to chuck all other authors aside and decide, finally, that I would read Woolf for my author project this year. After all my hemming and hawing, choosing Woolf felt so wonderfully, deliciously easy. I’m not under any illusions that reading her nine novels, all her short fiction and many of her essays will be a walk in the park, if anything Woolf provides an exhausting reading experience – her prose is so damn busy – but, I feel the same excitement heading into the project as I have felt in the past for other authors. So I know I’ve made the right decision.

But getting back to what convinced me – The Mark on the Wall. Reading Virginia Woolf gives me the same feeling I get when I step up from the metro in Paris. No matter the neighborhoods and their different flavors, this is Paris. Unmistakably. (Haussmann, Haussmann, Haussmann). I’ve never quite had this feeling anywhere else. And reading Woolf is the same – a few sentences in to The Mark on the Wall and already I knew – the voice, the active, vivid images, those industrious sentences. The skipping and shifting from thought to thought.

Now, as stories go The Mark on the Wall isn’t at all a story. It’s a series of thoughts squeezed between the two tiny actions of a woman looking through her cigarette smoke at a blot on the wall and a man laying his newspaper on the table. There is no conversation, no movement, no “story”.

But as thoughts go, these jumps and meditations and musings are fantastic. Woolf mimics the heady rush of thought, hopping and sliding from one idea to the next. The woman smoking her cigarette (is it Woolf? several clues make me say ‘yes, probably’) contemplates and imagines a messy little war between modernity and nature, men and women, tradition and fancy. At the same time she is engaged with her own intellectual process, aware of her slide of thought and both indulging and checking it as she goes along.

The pace of the story is frenetic. There is nowhere for the reader to settle, except in the tiny moments of exploded detail:

I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, tumbling all night long.

Lastly, although the story has no explicit, outward movement, it contains a tense feeling of expectation. Why isn’t she getting up? It’s a little like she’s trapped inside this moment, but happily so, willing to entertain her imagination, her fierce thoughts. It is clear that the intellectual exercise is one of pure pleasure, and she’s indulging it to the fullest. Until the end, of course, when she is inevitably interrupted.

Reading Writer – what am I reading for?

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One of the most useful things I took away from my MFA program was a way to read with an eye on the writing. Maybe some writers do this instinctively, maybe I was doing it a little bit on my own before I became aware of it, but now I work very hard to do this consciously and with each book that I read.

I don’t just mean the larger decisions like POV or tense or structure. I try to keep track of the smaller stuff as well, like how a particular author handles transitions between scenes or time periods or how they might break into a scene with narrative summation, how long they let that summation last and how they get back to the action. I try looking for certain stylistic repetitions and why they might be useful or what kind of decisions an author has made about revelation vs. suggestion. I’ve found that cataloguing these kind of textual details gives me something to go and look at when I get stuck in a scene or an idea and don’t quite know how to work through it.

Sometime last year I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and although this book was intensely gripping I couldn’t keep my writer brain from taking some serious notes about how he sustained such intensity for over 200 pages. First off, structurally, he does not ever give the reader a break. There are no natural pauses in the text, no line breaks and no real time jumps. Each scene moves directly and smoothly into the next, something which makes it difficult for many readers to put the book down. Second, he only allows his main character’s focus to waver from the present action (i.e. to reflect on the past) on three or four very short occasions. So those moments really stand out, like little psychic breakdowns, and are subsequently very powerful. Also, he doesn’t go into a lot of detail about any actual violence. His restraint is pretty amazing and I think it pays off. Leaving things to the reader’s imagination in many scenes is much worse. There’s plenty of examples and I should drag out my notes and do a proper post on this book sometime, because in terms of crafting this type of fiction, it’s a goldmine.

So if I ever want to write a novel with a similar intensity I would go back and read The Road about a million times, looking for all these details. I would probably also take out Don Delillo’s The Body Artist and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another writer that comes to mind is Virginia Woolf. In To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway she writes with a similar intensity, keeping the reader thoroughly submerged beneath the story, although her overall affect is much less “dark”.

I enjoy going through as much fiction as possible this way because it helps me understand what kind of aesthetic I create with my own choices when I’m writing. I like what McCarthy did to establish an intense reading experience so I want to see if some of those techniques apply to my own writing. They won’t always but I hope that examining his choices is one way to develop as a writer.

Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway

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I realized after reading Mrs. Dalloway that I knew nothing about Virginia Woolf’s life except the bare facts of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her suicide in 1941. Did everyone else know that she was raised in a fairly Brady Bunch style household? That both her parents were previously married, had children and then divorced, married each other, had more children and then raised eight children altogether in the same house? For some reason I had wrongly envisioned Woolf as having a lonely childhood. I figured she may have been the child of older or inattentive parents who was left to create her own colorful world, thus learning her skills for story and fiction at a young age. Of course then I realized that having seven siblings is not necessarily an immunization for loneliness. Nor does a bustling, people-filled world keep you from developing a passion for imaginative creation.  

Bustling is one of the first adjectives that comes to mind when I think of Mrs. Dalloway. Every one of the characters seems to be somehow speeding along in perpetual motion. They are all so physically and mentally busy – crashing from one thought to the next, hurrying headlong into the next action or event. The novel just steams forward, halfway out of breath but never once apologizing for its exhausting momentum. I realize this is all a function of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style but she just accomplishes it all so immaculately.  

Reading the book felt a bit like listening to a boisterous symphony, with all those instruments playing madly in the background while one violin (Peter Walsh, for example) or an alto flute (Clarissa might just have to be the flute) plays a theme in his or her particular voice just a bit louder than the rest. The music behind never quite vanishes and sometimes the soloists fight a bit for space. I quite like the idea of Peter as a violin, with a disturbing octaval range and the ability to play a few notes that are just a bit too high to be comfortable. The overall effect of this rambunctious orchestra is hectic and eventful but everything seems to blend perfectly in the end. 

The story itself is so wonderfully simple. A woman gets herself and home ready for a party, a man stops in to say hello to an old friend, some men eat lunch with a wealthy older woman, another man and his wife visit a doctor, a young girl and her tutor run to the shops, and so on and so forth from the morning all the way through the early evening of this significant day. Then everyone (minus one) comes together for a party. That’s pretty much it. But within all those little errands and conversations Woolf creates a series of fascinatingly full portraits combined with a healthy serving of social commentary. Each story and character explodes with their own past, with regrets and worries, with all those eccentric bits of real personality. 

Mrs. Dalloway is the kind of book that leaves me with the impression that I haven’t even scratched the surface of all that lies beneath its clever prose and brisk story. It isn’t difficult, that’s not what I mean. I just have the feeling that I could read this book once a year and find something new to admire or think about each and every time.   

mid-read thoughts on Mrs. Dalloway

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I wanted to post some mid-read thoughts on Mrs. Dalloway this morning. This is my second time reading the book but after quite a long time so much of the text strikes me as though I am reading it for the first time. I might not wait so long for my next reread. Dorothy has some interesting comments on the question of when we reread something and how the proximity of the two readings affects our understanding of it. I like looking at this question, especially after reading Nabokov’s opinion that we never actually read a book, we can only reread it. 

The first read of a wonderful book is quite special, isn’t it? So consuming and intense. New ideas to mull over. New people to wonder about. A new place to investigate. But a second or third read can be an altogether delightful experience as well. A bit like seeing an old friend after several years’ absence – there is the first rush of excitement when you must get all the details out of the way, but then you settle in to a more leisurely moment of appreciation and sharing.  

That’s a bit how I feel reading Mrs. Dalloway this week. What I love most about the book is the way everything seems to just zoom along from one moment to the next. Each page has so much energy. Woolf’s prose has so much force, so much vigor. I get the sense that every little action or event is spectacular, or laced with emotion and meaning. Yet she manages to do this without coming across as overblown. I admit that reading Mrs. Dalloway is, at times, somewhat exhausting. But a very good exhausting.  

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turn at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendeliean theory – away the aeroplane shot. 

Is it possible to put more humanity into a single paragraph? The entire book is like this – each new scene pregnant with ideas and ruminations that go beyond the specific instant described. Where Woolf really gets me is with the details, the splendid and unique reflections that she settles upon the most ordinary moments: 

…could not help wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. 

Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. 

A book like this makes me want it to go on forever. A huge volume I could read slowly for the rest of my life, paragraph after paragraph, line by line. Always a new surprise, another flash of genius, on the next page. I am halfway finished and already sad that I will eventually reach the last page. This time around, I don’t think I will be waiting very long before I pick it up again and start all over again.