VIRGINIA WOOLF and the Modern Metropolis

1. VIRGINIA WOOLF and the Modern Metropolis

2. Words Live in the Mind… they hate being useful, they hate making money… The truth they try to catch is many-sided… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7684225.stm

3. Modern Fiction (1919) Modernist Manifesto Three interrelated issues: • Victorian conventions are inadequate • Aesthetics of fragmentation Complex plot vs analysis of interior life Omniscient narrator vs fragmented point of view perspective vs. simultaneous impressions - Assault on the coherence of and stability of unitary consciousness and perception: Freudian influence (Layered I, Multiple and unknowable self, Importance of memory in shaping the self, studies on shell shock = neurosis and the unconscious)

4. Mr Joyce • Complex plot • vs • analysis of interior life • Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventious, whether it be probability, or coherence • p. 9 Ulysses 1914-1921 in the Little Review The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist (1914-1915)

5. perspective vs. simultaneous impressions • Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.From all sidesthey come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old… so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy… • p. 8

6. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. • MEMORY

7. Assault on the coherence of and stability of unitary consciousness and perception Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness • MEMORY IS THE ONLY COHESIVE ELEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

8. What does one mean by 'the unity of the mind', I pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the street, for example and think of itself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can think back through its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that woman writing thinks back through her mothers.Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. • From A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN 1929

9. 1910-11: Post-impressionists exhibition in London (organized by Roger Fry) • (Cubism, 1907; Abstractism, 1910). • Cinema Pablo Picasso - Demoiselles d'Avignons - 1907 Vassilij Kandinskij - Acquerello astratto - 1910

10. Story Essays • A first-person unnamed narrator, interior monologue • Breaking with conventional narrative expectations, from the "straight lines" of narrative conventions • Focusing on marginal, unexpected viewpoints, such as the outsider within bourgeois society • A creative hand that brings together the poetic lyric, the prosaic narrative, and an audience open to the shocks and flights of a new angle of vision.

11. … the rhythms of the body and the unconscious have managed to break through the strict rational defences of conventional social meaning. One might argue in this light that Woolf’s refusal to commit herself in her essays to a so-called rational or logical form of writing, free from fictional techniques, indicates a similar break with symbolic language, as of course do many of the techniques she deploys in her novels. • Toril Moi Sexual/Textual Politics 1985

12. Street Haunting • Antecedents: Flâneur The narrator represents a twentieth-century adapted version of the nineteenth-century French flaneur.

13. Flâneur • 1806: an anonymous pamphlet describes a day in the life of M. Bonhomme, a typical flaneur of the Bonaparte era

14. 19° century France: in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, members of a class of writers and journalists who, in the serial sections of the Paris newspapers, wrote sketches of urban life from the perspective of a strolling situated observer (Brand, 1991, p.6). (Drawing by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet)

15. Compare with VW’s Feminist rewriting of the flaneur/flaneuse: • The narrator is more at home in the public space of the streets than the privacy of interior bourgeois space • The image of misplaced, petit-bourgeois • The lost ideal of internal social space: the shop • Desire First paragraph p. 70

16. An enlightened vision of the city • Charles Baudelaire's flâneur figure, typically a male dandy who recounts his perceptions and experience in strolling without purpose through city streets, appealed to proponents of the avant-garde in the 1920s as a model for revolutionary perception. • Also in SH it is the flâneur's disinterested eye that looks: "With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous.“

17. Cinema • Walter Benjamin links the change in perception of Baudelaire's art with the new art of film. • In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin writes that cinema opens up a new world for the flâneur by bursting open the "prison-world" of our habitual life, "[o]ur taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories”

18. Benjamin observes how the camera's intervention prompts the eye to re-see its world: "Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye--if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man." • It is into the depths of the perceiving subject (rather than the streets) that the audience goes exploring, as the film "reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject."

19. …"Street Haunting“ (1927) • Woolf's "Street Haunting" takes up the tradition of the flâneur in its narrator's stroll through London, and as a catalyst for her estranged perception of her own interior experience.

20. In "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" (1927), VirginiaWoolf's narrator describes the experience of stepping from one's familiar, habitual room into the street. • Woolf's image of the shell breaking to unhouse "a central oyster ofperceptiveness" • "The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” • p.71 (2)

21. Traditional flaneur: voyeuristic man who takes visual possession of the city • Androgynous narrator: ‘a fluid universe of shifting meanings’ (Wilson, 1991, p. 102). • P. 71 (3)

22. Deviating from "the straight lines of personality" into "those footpaths" that lead to the hearts of "those wild beasts, our fellow men" is an escape that is "the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.“ • P. 81

23. Different sights that provoke profound ethical questions about identity, prejudice, and the possibility of empathy and action. The reader is surprised by the question, "What, then, is it like to be a dwarf? • P. 72

24. the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it p. 74 • Awareness of those whom habit and class privilege contrive to make invisible- • Suspension of authorial judgment. In refusing to resolve such questions, to provide the catharsis of mimetic action, Woolf places the onus to see, consider, and act on her audiences.

25. Limits of one's vision yet aspiring to see from these other standpoints • Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others • P. 81 (1)

26. The Metropolis and Freedom • Narrative of female entrapment in the eclipsed bourgeouis ideal of the private interior • The narrator is more at home in the public space of the streets than the privacy of interior bourgeois space • P. 81

27. City and Feminism • To show the inadequacy of given gendered categories and narratives--our "houses," "shells," and "rooms"--to contain or express their subjects. • Woolf saw aesthetic innovation as vitally connected to a feminist vision; it must have the explosiveness to, as Benjamin wrote, "burst this prison-world" of our habitual perceptions "asunder."

28. Feminine Desire becomes central • "The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.“ Laura Mulvey DESIRE OPENS AND CLOSES ESSAY p. 70 and p. 81

29. Desire… • Woolf's narrator may necessarily return to the room of habit and recognize the comfort of "the old possessions, the old prejudices [that] fold us round, and shelter and enclose the self," but the narrator also returns to the room with a conspicuous object, which she asks us to examine "tenderly," to touch "with reverence": "the only spoil we have retrieved from the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.”

30. Empowers her, she can write • Fetishistic consumer attraction for the pencil, a symbol of desire

31. The potential of the lyric moment • Woolf attempts the alternation of two frames of reference: • 1) a human perspective of the prosaic (such as the sights the London street offers, "the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses, the … butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and their purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass") • 2) a timeless perspective of the poetic (the composition "of these trophies in such a way as to bring out their more obscure angles and relationships").

32. The eye and brain collaborate to discover "beauty" in and create imaginary houses for the self from "the tide of trade… so punctually and prosaically" deposits on Oxford Street, precisely because it is the flâneur's disinterested eye that looks: "With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous."

33. The narrator's mind uses the objects and images of London's streets that the eye seizes upon during its ramble for lyrical, imaginative departures but must finally also return to "habit," the socially constructed and contained "I" within the familiar confines of one's room.

34. However, Woolf's androgynous narrator, as a writer-flâneur, has the ability to depart from habit at will and thus has more freedom to alter the habitual.

35. Joyce, Epiphany Woolf, Moments of being = an intense experience or insight, heightened intense feeling It was a suddenrevelation, a tingelike a blush when one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over — the moment. From Mrs Dalloway

36. Flying over London • The artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) identified the aerial landscape (especially the "bird's-eye view", looking straight down, as opposed to an oblique angle): radicalizing paradigm in the art of the twentieth century. • Aerial landscape painting and abstract painting: not only because familiar objects are sometimes difficult to recognize when viewed aerially, but because there is no natural "up" or "down" orientation in the painting. Jackson Pollock, Painting (Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red), 1948, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.

37. Aviation afforded an unprecedented freedom • The prose documents of pilots quickly became the raw material for poets who translated the aviator's actual accounts into flights of fancy. i.e. ending p. 210

38. THE METROPOLIS and the Fragmentation of the I/Eye • The city escapes synthesis and can only be represented in fragments • New perspective… unsettles habit p. 203 • Again the prosaic and poetic Metropolis, F. Lang, 1927.

39. a critique of anthopocentrism/human perspective of the prosaic (one becomes conscious of being a little mammal… the world of brussel sprouts and sheep) p. 203 2) a timeless perspective of the poetic (One could see through the bank of England…) p. 204

40. The metropolis and memory • London is portrayed as a multilayered text that can be read and interpreted. The city as a palimpsest, that is to say, as a text that is built up layer after layer where the past is preserved underneath the present p. 132 (1) Palimpsest

41. Because of the impending break of the bourgeois stage of history and its private interiors, the city is mixed, partial and layered, as districts and houses overlap with one another in space and in time (the masses turning private into public space)

42. She describes the sensation of ascending in an airplane, as the Moth rose "like a spirit shaking contamination from its wings, shaking gasometers and factories and football fields from its feet." The mystical experience of flight provided a perfect metaphor for freedom from life on earth : “It was a moment of renunciation. We prefer the other, we seemed to say. Wraiths and sand dunes and mist; imagination; this we prefer to the mutton and entrails. It was the idea of death that now suggested itself . . . not immortality, but extinction.” p. 205 • The pilot becomes a Charon