Mapping the Modern Mind: Virginia Woolf’s parodic approach to the art of fiction in "Jacob’s Room"

In this study the author conducts a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s first ‘experimental’ novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). Her reading is based on the fundamental premise that the novel is an exploration of fictional form, rather than an exposition of any preconceived idea. Jacob’s Room is an essentially modernist text, and is characterised by extensive genre-mixing typical of the art of fiction in the early 20th century. Throughout her study the author analyses the extent to which the novel transgress the ‘boundaries’ of the novelistic genre. She explores the generic interface between the novel and those genres which are deemed to be innate to Virginia Woolf’s sensibility, i.e. the journalistic essay, biography and impressionist painting. The premise of this study leads the author to read the novel on two levels of significance: On the narrative, ‘surface’ level of the novel, Woolf constructs the tragic life of a promising young Englishman, Jacob Flanders, who dies in the First World War. Simultaneously, on the metafictional level of significance, Woolf, through her garrulous narrator, mocks and evaluates the actions of her characters, experimenting with various points of view in an attempt to define the character of her protagonist. Jacob’s ‘room’ is thus conceived as a ‘mental space’ in which a modern writer’s mind is ‘mapped’. The central aesthetic question which is debated in this room or forum relates to the essential art of modern fiction in general and the efficiency of characterisation in fiction in particular. It is argued that Virginia Woolf probes into the epistemic question of the essence of modern man and, in an attempt to capture the essence of her protagonist, speculates on the corresponding literary question how, and to what extent, the ‘soul’ of man can to be represented in fiction. The author uses this generic approach to the novel as a broad structuring principle for her study of Jacob’s Room. After discussing the socio-political context of modernism in the early 20th century, including the impact of the First World War on modernist writing, she focuses her study on those aspects of Woolf’s fiction which are deemed fundamental to the narrative strategy in Jacob’s Room, i.e. the role and nature of Woolf’s humour within the context of modernism the ‘nodes’ or clusters of metaphors and symbols recurring in the text the role of the narrator as ‘toastmaster’ of the debate on character and fiction in Jacob’s Forum the extent to which the novel parodies the ‘new biography’ of the early twentieth century and the extent to which Woolf transvaluates the tools of impressionist painting into modernist fiction.

Textprobe: Kapitel 3, The Making of a Writer: Virginia Stephen was born into a tradition of Victorian literary aristocracy. Her mother, Julia Prinsep, née Jackson, quondam Duckworth, was renowned for her beauty and her service to the community. In her autobiographical memoir, ‚A Sketch of the Past‘, Woolf re-creates the childhood of her mother as she imagines it to have been in the creative ambiance enveloping Little Holland House, the summer house of Woolf’s aunt, Sara Prinsep. Jeanne Schulkind (1976:86-7) notes that Sara Prinsep entertained, in a highly eccentric fashion, diplomats, politicians and an aristocracy of intellectuals like Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and G.F Watts. Contrary to the artistic bent of her mother, Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge and a London man of letters. Although initially a sickly child, Bell (2010) points out that Leslie Stephen was to become an alpinist extraordinaire, and was hailed by his peers as one of the greatest agnostic writers of his time. In this section I will hope to show how Woolf’s heritage, which is founded on a tension between artistic expression and rationalist scepticism, impacts on the nature of her writing. Leslie Stephen is perhaps best known as the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Founded in 1882, the year of Virginia’s birth, the DNB was to become a paragon of English literary culture. Naturally, Leslie Stephen’s daughter also earned a mention in the annals of English literary history. In the old edition of the DNB (published in 1959), Lord David Cecil, who was personally acquainted with the Stephen family, enthuses that in the work of Virginia Woolf, the English aesthetic movement brought forth its most exquisite flower.” Similarly, half a century later, the literary scholar Lyndall Gordon (2010) uses equally descriptive language in his summation of Woolf: Here she is hailed as the ‘high Priestess of modernism’. A juxtaposition of the respective epithets chosen by Cecil and Gordon is an instructive illustration of the history of the reception of Woolf’s work. Indeed, a summary perusal of the criticism of Woolf in the near-century since the publication of Jacob’s Room in 1922 invokes the impression that much of the contemporary scholarship in Woolf studies are primarily concerned with an attempt to re-affirm the merit of her canonical status in English literature in general, and/or to advocate her primary significance to the Modernist Movement in particular. This impression is affirmed when reviewing the reception of her work in the context of the ‘culture wars’ initiated by the Cambridge School, especially the critical standards set by the literary periodical, Scrutiny (1932-53) and it’s influential editor, F.R. Leavis. I would now like to refer to the critical reception of Woolf’s work in general and Jacob’s Room in particular, in order to illustrate the particular circumstances surrounding the publication of the novel in 1922, as I believe these circumstances are relevant to the somewhat ambivalent, even defensive, tone of the novel. 3.1, The Critical Reception of Woolf and Jacob’s Room: It was pointed out in my introduction that Virginia Woolf was not primarily interested in being a ‘popular’ novelist. On the contrary, her journalistic essays show that she consistently argued against the socialist tide of popular Edwardian fiction. This stance often brought her into conflict with contemporary writers. In addition, it has been pointed out that the perceived ‘subjectivity’ of her criticism earned much disapprobation from critics like Leavis and Richards who were intent upon propagating a stringently objective standard in early twentieth-century literary criticism. Not all criticism was negative however, and a good example of a more balanced and succinct appreciation of her work is that of her contemporary novelist, E.M. Forster (1942): [Woolf] selects and manipulates her impressions is not a great creator of character enforces patterns on her books has no great cause at heart.” With respect to Jacob’s Room in particular, Forster sums up the impact this novel had upon its publication in 1922 as follows: ... we were tremendously surprised. The style and sensitiveness of Kew Gardens remained, but they were applied to human relationships, and to the structure of society. The blobs of colour continue to drift past, but in their midst, interrupting their course like a closely sealed jar, stands the solid figure of a man. The improbable has occurred a method essentially poetic and apparently trifling has been applied to fiction. (p. 16-17, my emphasis) The most celebrated of Woolf’s critics was of course the Edwardian novelist and critic, Arnold Bennett. In fact, it was Jacob’s Room in particular that provoked Bennett to remark shortly after publication of the novel in March 1923: I have seldom read a cleverer book... [It] is exquisitely written. But the characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness. Woolf was stung by this criticism, and declared war. The ensuing critical war between Bennett and Woolf became an integral part of the debate on the nature of character in contemporary fiction, and, most famously, produced Woolf’s celebrated essay, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923), which will be discussed in more detail in par. 5.1 below. The general consensus in contemporary critical circles was that Woolf’s method was, as Forster notes, ‘essentially poetic, if somewhat obscure. For even Forster (1942:19) was puzzled by her method, and expressed doubt as to whether her characters ‘lived’ beyond the pages of her book, as for example George Eliot’s Dorothea Casaubon or Austen’s Emma, have a vitality that transcends the fictional sphere. Thus the form and characterization of the novel received the most negative criticism, despite varying efforts to remain neutral. For example, Majumdar and Mclaurin (1975:96, 105, 105) point out that Woolf’s contemporary as the Times Literary Supplement, A.S. McDowell, recognized the nature of Woolf’s experimental aims to represent the ‘queer simultaneity of life’. Similarly, the reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, W.L. Courtney, bemoaned the lack of plot, yet appreciated the lyric quality of the novel: ...if you want to know what a modern novel is like, you have only to read Jacob’s Room. ... In its tense syncopated movements, its staccato impulsiveness, do you not discern the impulse of Jazz? Finally, Majumdar and Mclaurin (1975:100-1) record the most sarcastic remark concerning the style of the novel, which was made by the renowned critic and reviewer for the New Statesman, Rebecca West: Very strongly, has Mrs. Woolf preferred Jacob’s room to his company. Jacob lives, but that is hearsay. Jacob dies there could be nothing more negative than the death of one who never (that we could learn for certain) lived. But his room we know. (my emphasis) I shall hope to demonstrate in par. 5 below that West’s observation is very astute, as it perceives - albeit unwittingly - the premise of my hypothesis regarding Jacob’s Forum. For the present purposes however, these critical judgements illustrate the kind of ‘subjective’ impressions which were rejected by the New Critics.

• Virginia Woolf

• Modernism

• Jacob's Room

• Genre

• Narrative Form

Lindy van Rooyen was born into a bilingual family in Pretoria, South Africa in 1970. Literature has not always been her profession, but her passion. She completed her law degree (LL.M) at the University of Stellenbosch in 1998, and after four years in Copenhagen, Denmark she settled in Hamburg, Germany in 2002. Shortly thereafter she commenced her Master’s degree in Scandinavian and English Literature at the University of Hamburg, which she successfully completed in 2011. Through her extensive academic study of the law, foreign languages and literature, Lindy van Rooyen has developed a keen interest in the ‘grey’ areas between the precision of language and the seemingly infinite realm of human experience. Her first contact with the fiction of Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in the summer of 2003 proved to be pivotal. Virginia Woolf’s quest to define the essence of the human ‘soul’ within the limits of the art of fiction seemed to echo her own fascination with the tension between the necessity for brevity, the economy of language and the seemingly boundless vistas of the human mind, which had been the subject of ‘literary philosophers’ like Shakespeare, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In her study of Jacob’s Room, the author traces Woolf’s attempt to express and define the soul of modern man within the confines of a single, fictional ‘room’.