Hermione Lee's marvellously rich 1996 biography records in detail Woolf's lifelong, crippling sensitivity to judgment of her work, the easy collapse of her writing authority, a pattern of breakdown around publication time. She is trying too hard or rather (all good writers are trying hard), her trying shows up on her writing surface, as a residue of fuss, a too-manifest apparatus of cleverness and attention to effect. Woolf's attention, by contrast, seems to twist anxiously between looking ahead at the thing she tries to make, and looking back at us watching her do it – her audience, her judges. Writing, Mansfield seems to have forgotten us in the trance of seeing and listing (seeing what isn't there) reading, we forget ourselves.
The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered … The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them …" The unornamented, denoting language seems effortlessly transparent. "The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist.
Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay" begins with dawn over the sea, too. And there's something heavily, surprisingly Victorian about the image – more John Martin than Roger Fry. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface …" Isn't that effortful and self-conscious? I can't see through the woman and the lamp (and the fan, and the fibres) to any fresh morning. The first paragraph is all right, though not exciting then in the second "the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman crouched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. I can't make myself like, for instance, the opening of The Waves, day dawning over the sea. The theme is characteristic Woolf too: the capture of the under-layers of consciousness, and how the fixity of social forms ("he must change" – his clothes and his demeanour, himself), imposes cruelly on their fluidity.Īnd sometimes she writes so heavily, in such laboured sentences. Everything floats, and yet in its floating is precise. He must change." That's so characteristic in its delicate evanescence – there's not a solid word in there (except for the dread car). "The ghost of convention rose to the surface, as a blush or a tear rises to the surface at the pressure of emotion so the car touched his training. In Between the Acts, Giles arrives home from work in the city and finds a car at the door, which tells him there are visitors to lunch. S ometimes Virginia Woolf writes so exquisitely well.
0 kommentar(er)
