Technological Devices as Literary Devices in Virginia Woolf-3

32 CHAPTER TWO “TO LEAVE THE STRAIGHT LINES OF PERSONALITY”: DEVICES OF CONTIGUITY [T]he motor is turning out the joy of our lives, an additional life, free and mobile and airy, to live alongside our usual stationary industry. We spin off to Falmer, ride over the Downs, drop into Rottingdean, then sweep over to Seaford, call in pouring rain at Charleston, pass the time of day, return for tea, all as light and easy as a hawk in the air. Soon we shall look back at our pre-motor days as we do now at our days in the caves. 1 - Diary, 10 August 1927 The automobile and the experience of motoring are motifs that carry through Virginia Woolf‟s writing, especially in her novels of London life. Woolf‟s London is shaped by the ceaseless flow of motorcars and crisscrossed by London omnibuses and trains; her London resounds with the ringing of Big Ben and hums in the wake of aircraft passing overhead. In chapter one I examine technological devices of the visionary life. The technologies are mostly metaphorical– a mental x-ray, a hypothetical electric machine to access the past, a fictional leech-like device to understand Quentin‟s thoughts. The technological devices in chapter one are devices of science fiction – or if not, as in the case of Mr. Bankes and his telephone, a device that enables fiction (of Mrs. Ramsay as a Greek goddess). The devices in this chapter, however, are actual technologies that come into mass manufacture during Woolf‟s 1 Anne Oliver Bell, ed., A Moment’s Liberty, the Shorter Diary of Virginia Woolf, (London: The Hogarth Press 1992) 235. 33 lifetime. The motorcar and the omnibus are enfolded into the everyday life of a Londoner; they organize the movement of people in the city in actuality and in fiction. Virginia Woolf had an “aficionado‟s passion” for the automobile.2 In 1927 Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought their first car – a second hand Singer they named “The Umbrella” – with earnings from To the Lighthouse.3 Both husband and wife took driving lessons; Leonard soon became a skillful driver, but Virginia did not have the same aptitude for the task. Quentin Bell remembered her having once taken the car “through a hedge,” 4 and in a letter Woolf confessed to Ethel Sands, “I have driven from the Embankment to the Marble Arch and only knocked one boy very gently off his bicycle.”5 Eventually she gave up her driving lessons altogether, but in the summer of 1927 Woolf wrote in her diary that she could “talk of nothing but cars…all images are…tinged with driving a motor.”6 It was the liberating power of the motor car that enraptured Woolf,” writes Makiko Minow-Pinkney,7 and correspondingly the automobile figured in Woolf‟s novels as an enjoyable, if sometimes curious, device of modern technology. The epigraph reflects how the speed of the automobile makes it possible to condense many sights and experiences into a single day. The automobile brings to its occupants variegated weather, terrains, and cities effortlessly. The experience of motoring is rendered in the graceful vocabulary of a dance; the Woolfs “spin off,” “drop into,” “sweep over,” all “light and easy as a hawk in the air.” The motorcar is a way to freedom, providing variety for the mind and movement for the body. 2 Jan Morris, ed., Travels with Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1993) 7. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) 502. 4 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: a Biography Volume II (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1974) 129. 5 Nigel Nicolson et al. eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1923-1928 (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1980) 400, cited by Lee, 503. 6 Anne Oliver Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1925-1930 (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1981)146-9. 7 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, “Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000) 162. 3 34 The motorcar also elicits a different genre of writing from Woolf. Though she is not a travel-writer, a volume called Travels with Virginia Woolf has collected the diary entries, letters and fragments of essays written by Woolf during her journeys. In the introduction, editor Jan Morris remarks on the alimentary effect of travel on Woolf‟s usually despondent imagination: Virginia‟s madness seldom shows [in this book], her resentments of gender are put aside…Virginia Woolf greatly enjoyed her journeys, home or away, and half a century after her death her pleasure remains with us, in these miscellaneous memoirs of movement and observation as a mostly merry legacy of a grand but tragic life.8 Travel, “movement,” and “observation” are set against grandeur, tragedy, and “madness.” Woolf‟s journeys are therapeutic for more than just her body; “[t]he car became in her mind a very engine of release, like travel itself perhaps.”9 To Morris, traveling remains one of the simple, enduring pleasures of Woolf‟s “grand but tragic” life. Indeed, the “merry legacy” of travel is portrayed as the remnant salvaged from the generally depressing tone of the rest of Woolf‟s admittedly more important – but also somber – opus. Whatever the validity of Morris‟s claim, the writing that fills her collection is full of breezy wit. That Woolf in the epigraph describes owning a car as “an additional life” highlights how much the experience of motoring differs from her usual “stationary industry” of writing. Morris does not allow for Woolf to be a true travel-writer, but cites a “brightness and transience” in Woolf‟s “topographical writing” that is different from the introspective pursuit of Woolf‟s fiction.10 The writing one does while traveling observes others, while the craft of fiction – Woolf‟s stationary industry” – draws deeply from the self. The latter is also primarily a movement of the mind, not body. Indeed, in 8 Jan Morris, ed., Travels with Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1993) 10. Ibid., 7. 10 Ibid., 10. 9 35 contemplative moods Woolf‟s characters often forget the body, as Mr. Bankes forgets Mrs. Ramsay‟s. I am not assuming that physical movement displaces mental movement – but the mental movement that occurs simultaneously with physical motion has a different quality and texture. It is, as Morris says of Woolf‟s travel writing, bright and transient. In chapter one, devices of unity leap across the staggering divide between oneself and the other person, between the present and the past. Perhaps in that search for interiority and the past are traces of the grandeur and tragedy Jan Morris sees in Virginia Woolf. Chapter two will examine a different model of the connection between human beings. Modern devices of transportation mediate the interaction between people in London. Woolf makes use of this device to sketch the tenuous yet essential links that bind the city in a web of relations. With cars, buses, airplanes and trains, Woolf connects disparate people by establishing them in mutual awareness of one another, tethering them into one contiguous body. The view on the world is made strange through the window of an automobile or within the confines of a moving train; as such, devices of transportation assert themselves in Woolf‟s literary project to restructure the social world of London, questioning the priority of intimate relationships and the boundaries of the subject. I Omnibuses, motorcars, hansoms, and other devices of transportation weave together layers of people and things in Virginia Woolf‟s London. The Years, one of Woolf‟s later realist novels, follows three generations of the Pargiter family in London from the late 1800s through the 1930s. Eleanor McNees writes that “above all, The Years is a London novel…it records the changes in transportation, commerce, and street life as city noises shift… from Victorian London 36 to London of the 1930s.”11 A 1937 review by Peter Monro Jack in the New York Times praises its sensitivity to place and time: “[l]ovely as The Waves was, The Years goes far behind and beyond it, giving its characters a local habitation and a name.”12 Woolf herself comments in her diaries that The Years has “more “real” life in it; more blood and bone.”13 The descriptions of London – including those of transportation – locate Woolf‟s characters in a specific time and place, imbuing them with a “local habitation and a name.” London at the turn of the twentieth century is not itself without the changing sounds made by the transportation; indeed, devices of transportation articulate a network that links people and things. When Eleanor Pargiter climbs on top of the omnibus, She relaxed; she breathed in the soft London air; she heard the dull London roar with pleasure. She looked along the street and relished the sight of cabs, vans, and carriages all trotting past with an end in view…this was her world. She was in her element. (TY 89) In this passage, Eleanor takes in the sights, smells, and sounds of the city in one synaesthetic whiff. When she feels herself “in her element” in London she describes seeing cars. The cars that that move London also make London; they have become an indispensable part of the city. From her vantage atop the omnibus Eleanor feels herself a moving part of the city. Around her she perceives the other “cabs, vans, and carriages” moving in tandem, and she is tethered, made continuous with the city through her movement. This sense of community, of being “in one‟s element” in the middle of London, then, is in large part mediated and enabled by devices of transportation. As these devices evolve through the novel, the primary way in which Londoners 11 Eleanor McNees, “Introduction,” in The Years (Orlando, Harcourt Books, 2008) lxv-lxvi. Peter Monro Jack, “Virginia Woolf‟s Richest Novel: in “the Years” Her Art Reaches its Fullest Development to Date,” New York Times 11 April 1937. 13 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953) 263. 12 37 like Eleanor feel connected to and elemental of their city is constantly made anew. North Pargiter notes “[i]t was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses…they used to look ridiculous” (TY 235). Each new technology of transportation replaces the last one completely as the primary mode of interaction between a person and his city. The way that a single Londoner feels tethered to the body of the city is to join in its movement, with the devices of movement particular to that time. The omnibus, as mediator of social interactions, also refigures the individual‟s sense of his place among the people of the city. The historical London omnibus was a largely middle class conveyance that began operating in London in 1856.14 Eleanor, spinster and philanthropist, takes the omnibus across London to attend to her housing projects in the peripheral neighborhoods. On one particular trip, Eleanor returns home on the omnibus after winning an argument with one of the builders, She cast a glance at her fellow-passengers. They all looked settled, elderly, as if their minds were made up. For some reason she always felt that she was the youngest person on an omnibus, but today, since she had won her scrap with Judd, she felt that she was grown up. (TY 95) Eleanor sees her “fellow-passengers” on the omnibus as one collective body. All of them are united in looking “settled, elderly,” and purposeful as well, “as if their minds were made up” – though the only thing they share is a bus route, a collective movement in a collective space. Walter Benjamin writes, “[h]ere is something… characteristic of the big city…Before buses, railroads, and streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in a position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without 14 Eleanor McNees, “Introduction,” in The Years (Orlando, Harcourt Books), lxv. 38 exchanging a word”.15 No words are exchanged, but minds are made up. The silent body of passengers forms the constant, unchangeable social landscape, and against their stoic regard Eleanor “always” feels like the “youngest person on an omnibus.” Her sense of self-progress and personal development comes from seeing her own status on the bus as “grown up” like everyone else, “settled” and determined. An omnibus offers the chance of self-reflection through comparison with the assumed social body. The omnibus also allows the readers to see how Eleanor fits into the fabric of society by offering a view from a different perspective. To another‟s eyes she is part of the social body. This paragraph follows immediately after Eleanor‟s thoughts above. The man whose toe she had trodden on sized her up; a well-known type; with a bag; philanthropic; well nourished; a spinster; a virgin; like all the women of her class, cold; her passions had never been touched; yet not unattractive. (TY 96) The nameless man “size[s] [Eleanor] up”; his understanding, though based on appearances, is mostly accurate. She will remain a spinster, a virgin, and a philanthropist all of her life. Woolf reflects on the strange accuracy of surface impressions in her diary, writing “it has a slap dash and vigor sometimes hits and unexpected bull‟s eye.”16 Indeed, the man‟s evaluation of Eleanor as a “well-known type” is, though reductive, factually true. For him Eleanor fits into a particular stratum of his conception of London. We, as readers, are given the privilege of his perspective when the narrative voice slides from Eleanor to the nameless man as a bead would slide across the invisible thread that tethers them together. Eleanor steps off the bus almost immediately after that passage, and the narrative perspective travels with her, yet for this brief moment on the omnibus, it detaches itself from the tether of one mind to roam the compartment of the omnibus. 15 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 191, cited by Caughie, xxvi. 16 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953) 13. 39 Not only is London held together by the cars and omnibuses that trace its vast infrastructure, disparate perspectives of Londoners become contiguous through their mutual appraisal of one another on the very same cars and omnibuses. The brief moment that Eleanor shares with the nameless male passenger is a point of social contiguity. In addition to mediating the interactions of strangers, devices of transportation also figure in the representation of intimate relationships. The random intrusions that occur on public transportation are evoked to portray the element of impersonality residing in deep personal friendships. In Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh, who Clarissa Dalloway almost married, visits her again years later and leaves from their meeting filled with thoughts of her that he cannot get rid of. “He was not in love with her any more! He only felt…unable to get away from the thought of her; she [keeps] coming back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage” (MD 76). Peter compares Clarissa‟s persistent presence in his mind to the unintended physical intrusion of a fellow passenger, who, jolted in sleep by the random motion of the train, comes to rest in intimate repose against one‟s shoulder. Strangers enact the elements of intimacy, by chance. By drawing this analogy, Peter Walsh recasts his relationship to Clarissa, a relationship with a history of deep attachment, in a situation reminiscent of Eleanor and the unnamed man on the omnibus. Peter does this perhaps to distance himself from Clarissa‟s charm, and in so doing he points to the idea that personal history between two people, the times spent together in the distant past, distinguishes a lover from a random passenger. The “railway carriage,” as a literary device, provides a shared space and time for two people where intimacy and accidental touches of strangers are leveled. For when considered in the context of the moment, based only upon its surface appearance, there is no difference. The awareness of being together unites Peter and Clarissa; it also links complete strangers. “Woolf‟s writing of Mrs. Dalloway,” writes Gillian 40 Beer, “suggested that the most fundamental form of connection between human beings is being alive in the same place at the same time, rather than the chosen friendships and love-affairs that fiction ordinarily privileges.”17 Beer‟s “fundamental form of connection,” of “being alive in the same place at the same time” is the common denominator that remains consistent from mere acquaintance all the way to intimates. Peter and Clarissa have been, since their meeting that morning, re-established in the thoughts of each other as being “alive in the same place at the same time.” The fact of their contiguous existence is evocative of, or connected to, intimacy. This interchangeability between close acquaintance and stranger in the way they can both occupy the seat on bus next to one, dissolves the difference between stranger and intimate in the shared moment. Despite the depth, or the importance of certain relationships that make one privilege family and close friends over others, what tethers them at the root is that awareness of being alive at the same moment in London. Devices of technology bring the attention to this shared moment and are thus instrumental in how this particular form of human connection is represented. II Technological devices suggest a democratized, decentralized model of human interactions by focusing on the equalizing moment of encounter. In Mrs. Dalloway, this democratized contiguity exists alongside and in tension with a political and hierarchical model of social organization. Richard Dalloway, husband to Clarissa and a member of Parliament, reflects to himself that “he like[s] being ruled by the descendants of Horsa; he like[s] continuity; and the sense of handing on the tradition of the past” (MD 117). Monarchy has a linear and exclusive 17 Gillian Beer, “The Body of the People in Virginia Woolf: from Mrs. Dalloway to The Waves,” in Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) 48. 41 continuity, whereas devices of transportation present a non-linear, topographic sprawl and a network of connections. The scene in which a motor car backfires in the street outside Mulburry‟s flower shop juxtaposes the modes of mechanical and hierarchical organization. Was it the Prince of Wales‟s, the Queen‟s, the Prime Minister‟s?...Everything had come to a standstill…The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulburry‟s shop window; old ladies on the tops of the omnibuses spread their black parasols…Mrs. Dalloway…looked out with her little pink face pursed in inquiry. Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated… (MD 15) The eye of the narrative pans over the street while individual heads turn toward the motionless car. Ostensibly the gaze of the Londoners is motivated by their curiosity and desire to glimpse the “Prince of Wales[]” or the “Queen[]” or the “Prime minister.” Yet old ladies on omnibuses, the boys on their bicycles, Mrs. Dalloway at her shopping and Septimus Warren Smith are collected and their gaze organized by the conduits of transportation, infrastructure and commerce. Looking at the motorcar, people must look through the devices of technology, though sometimes these devices are so embedded as to be virtually transparent. The monarchical, political continuity that Richard Dalloway admires registers in the minds of Londoners only because it disrupts the system of transportation. Monarchy organizes by the power of ideals, the technology by its imbrications into daily life. Minow-Pinkney argues that the experience of riding in a motorcar “dissolves linear cohesion.”18 Here the motorcar is involved in scrambling the linear progression of power through the social channels, as its very nature suggests a mechanical and architectural principle that underlies and supports hierarchical power. Just as the 18 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, “Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000) 162. 42 ownership of a car was once a social symbol and in time became a commonplace device of individual freedom, the motorcar is here a symbol of hierarchical authority in a time when technologies have even ordered the way in which that hierarchical authority is experienced and conveyed. Devices of technology not only affect sensory experience; they touch on the social sphere. The skywriting scene that follows demonstrates that modes of mechanical tethering are at least as effective as, if not more effective than, the continuity held by monarchy in the form of the car with its shades drawn. As the motor car carrying the eminent public figure drives past the assembled crowd and through the gates of Buckingham Palace, an airplane cuts across the skies over London and begins to spell out letters in the sky. Amidst the confusion over what exactly the skywriter is trying to convey (much like the confusion over the identity of the important person passing in the motorcar), people are drawn to look. All down the mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent…then suddenly…the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent‟s park… away and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over Greenwich and all the masts, over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul and the rest… (MD 28) The plane, touching on “the Mall,” “Green Park,” Regent‟s Street, “St. Paul,” and the rest links a greater number of people in the act of looking than the local influence exerted by the motorcar in the example before. Melba Cuddy-Keane connects the invention of the wireless radio to this scene, writing that “the sound of the air plane is diffused from one point…but auscultized from a variety of positions…in the city implies the kind of expanded listening audience actualized with 43 the advent of broadcasting technology.” 19 She goes on to argue that a “liberating aurality” inheres in the wireless broadcast, suggestive of “more pluralistic and participatory forms.”20 A greater power of diffusion inheres in the airplane than the car, for the plane can reach the “expanded listening audience” of all London. Whereas the idea of royalty brings a city block together, indistinguishable letters written by the airplane in an advertisement garners the attention of tens of thousands. Cuddy-Keane uses “pluralism” in the quote above to denote the democratizing possibilities of the wireless, specifically that of accessing information that takes the very air for its medium. Of course, “pluralism” here could be also seen in another way, as the message that the plane is there to convey does not come across. Everyone who reads it sees something different. This is pluralism as a sort of anarchical, mutual disagreement. The new broadcasting technology, though it excels the more pedestrian modes for the number and range of its audience, has that inherent possibility of misinterpretation – if there had been any interpretation to begin with. It is the airplane and the motorcar, rather than the message or person it conveys, that creates continuity by establishing the awareness of a shared space and time. Gillian Beer‟s argument that the fundamental of human interaction lies in their being “alive in the same place at the same time” must be qualified in that people need to be made aware of their mutual, fortunate condition. People – and here the people of London - need a device that provides for this awareness of shared existence. The omnibus does this by throwing strangers together into one contained place. The airplane does this by broadcasting its message all over London. Within 19 “Auscultize (as opposed to focalize) would be the verb signifying the presentation of the sound as listened to; and auscultator (opposed to focalizer) would signify the person doing the listening.” More simply, the medical term used for when a doctor listens to your heart through a stethoscope. Quote from Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000) 71. 20 Ibid, 94. 44 Mrs. Dalloway, the ringing of Big Ben operates in much the same way as it weaves through the narrative. “Big Ben was striking. The leaden circles dissolve in air,” repeats through the narrative trajectories of Clarissa, Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and many others (MD 2, 46, 92, 184). It is not the abstract entity of Time that links people, but the sounding of time, the notification by the bells. The embodiment of time in the device of Big Ben rings out across London and alerts everyone to a shared temporality. In so doing these devices denotes to its “listening audience” their shared existence, in the same moment, on the same England. The simultaneity of perception created by the airplane and the clock invokes a widening of the world by its ability to tether greater number of perspectives. By positioning everyone in simultaneous awareness of others in a shared space and time, the motorcar, airplane, and bell tower function as technological and literary devices of tethering. Liesl Olson writes, “the sky writing airplane, the prime minister‟s motorcar, and the chiming of Big Ben, for instance, threads through each pedestrian‟s personal narrative…[and] sharpens the profound relationship between the individual and a larger sense of shared humanity.”21 This “threading,” Olson argues, is intimately implicated in the portrayal of the “ordinary” in Woolf‟s modernism.22 Indeed, Woolf had described The Years as a book about facts, not vision.23 Interestingly enough, The Years was the only New York Times Bestseller among all Woolf‟s books, though now it garners very little critical interest.24 Olson‟s use of the “ordinary” to explain the linkages in this chapter can also be reframed in terms of the technologies employed. Chapter one, which captures the less-ordinary life, deals with devices that attempt the impossible 21 Liesl Olson, “Virginia Woolf and the „Cotton Wool of Daily Life,‟” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (2003): 60. 22 Ibid., 47. 23 Ibid., 62. 24 Liesl Olson, “Virginia Woolf and the „Cotton Wool of Daily Life,‟” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (2003): 64. A search on JSTOR of “Virginia Woolf” and “The Years” yields mostly reviews on biographies of Woolf, and very few articles dealing directly with this particular novel. 45 complete unity between one person and another. The technologies in this chapter, however, are ordinary technologies assimilated into “ordinary” life; they enable and facilitate “ordinary” existence. In the dichotomy of matter and spirit, these devices and what they evoke belong the realm of material and matter. Cars, bell towers, buses participate in the everyday life, rather than the artist‟s visionary existence. In our present day, telephones do see and electric machines can bring us the voices of the past. They have become a part of our “ordinary,” though they may have been the “extraordinary” of another time. The “ordinary” is a shifting realm that keeps place with the rapid change of technologies. III The moment of mutual attention forms a tenuous link, one that is easily broken. Each component of that simultaneous attention is uncertain to persist into the next moment; therefore the mutuality is easily dismantled. In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf describes meeting a woman on a train who makes Woolf “begin almost automatically to write a novel about her.” But the train has to stop – and Woolf the narrator watches as Mrs. Brown “disappear[s], carrying her bag, into that vast blazing station…and I have never seen her again, never know what became of her.”25 The existence of the link depends on the device that has brought them together – here, the train. It is the nature of trains to reach their end point, and so the device that tethers two minds has the dissolution of that meeting built-in to it. Getting off the train, Mrs. Brown removes herself from sharing a space (the train compartment) and time with the narrator, who never hears from her again. The physical presence of the other is necessary for that linkage – this is another point that differs from chapter one. 25 Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984) 199. 46 Twice more in the essay Woolf repeats the necessary ending of their meeting. One must capture the spirit of Mrs. Brown before “the train stopped and she disappeared forever,” and before the ultimate end as “the train rush[es] to that station where we must all get out.”26 The forces – here a matter of time tables and destinations – that put two people together will not last. Likewise, every community of our lives must disintegrate into component parts, if not sooner, then at the “station where we must all get out.” Interestingly and rather paradoxically, the moment is no longer ordinary if the chance of its being lost without any record seems to prove such an anxiety for Woolf. Though it is assembled by chance, the chance linkage takes on a precious quality; Mrs. Brown becomes the incarnation of human nature itself. Compared to the moments of vision in chapter one, this presents a focus that is radically different for its valuing of the present moment, for only in the present moment can one have access to the physical presence of the other person. Mortality makes the ordinary encounters into something strange and unknown and worthy of attention. In To the Lighthouse Lily feels compelled by the sense of the inevitable end to attend to her art. She could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveler, even though his half-asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. (TTL 197) Every moment in time is singular, never to be repeated, a step into the unknown. Henri Bergson writes, “if everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality 26 Ibid., 209. 47 never recurs.”27 Likewise Olson writes that “Mrs. Dalloway pivots on this experience of the ordinary as something strange, in that the ordinary always exists in a new moment of time.”28 Indeed, tracing the use of the train as a literary trope within Woolf, one could find instances where ordinary reality dips into the strangeness of what it is – a “concrete reality” that “never recurs.” The train is suited to Woolf‟s artistic purpose in that it captures both the ordinariness and the irretrievable nature of the moment, and perhaps that is why she reuses the image through her fiction and nonfiction. Her consistency in tying in certain themes and preoccupations with particular technological devices is indicative of how technological devices mediate her aesthetic sensibilities, as certain technologies become associated with certain moods. Whereas the image of the train is associated with passing time, the trope of the motorcar evokes the idea of strange worlds never to be encountered again. What I like…about motoring is the sense it gives one of alighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches the planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded but for this chance glimpse.29 The sense of strangeness is emphasized in this passage. The awareness of passing time is subordinated by the sense of how different “scenes” are in the spaces beyond one‟s reach. The spatial freedom connected to “motoring” manifests in how, rather than observing the moment flying by while one sits helpless in the train carriage, the observer in the automobile becomes a “voyager,” able to strike out from the straight line of the railroad to investigate the hidden 27 Henri Bergson, Creative evolution, Trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover publications, 1998) 46, cited by Olson, 49. 28 Liesl Olson, “Virginia Woolf and the „Cotton Wool of Daily Life,‟” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (2003): 49. 29 “21 August 1927,” Nigel Nicolson et al. eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1923-1928 (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1980) 153. 48 corners of the world. The glimpses uncovered here, by a unique alignment of observer and observed, is in its irretrievability akin to the scenes flying outside the window of the train traveler. In both cases the anxiety lies in the moment going “unrecorded,” seen for the “first time” but also the “last time.” For the passenger in the railway train, time moves: that particular configuration of “town” and “mule cart” and “that woman at work” are irretrievable because they exist precisely at that moment in time. In the second, the voyager is a space traveler; where she alights is entirely a matter of chance, and never to be returned to again. The need to record these scenes serves as a final tethering of the fleeting moment to something material, something that cannot fade. Whether altered by space or by time, these two examples mark the instability of any social interaction, as the outside forces of time and space assail the connection between self and other. Thus, though devices of transportation tether, they do so under tenuous terms. The connections between people – strangers and intimates alike, from a community of two to the community of a whole city – are therefore also tenuous and unstable. Even Big Ben, which strikes on the hour and structures Mrs. Dalloway into hours, imparts to it both the stability of ordered time, and the urgency of its limited duration. Harold Bloom writes, “To speak of measuring one‟s time by days or months, rather than years, has urgency, and this urgency increases when the fiction of duration embraces only hours, as Mrs. Dalloway does”30 Limitations of our lives are intertwined with the devices that govern our experience of life. IV Technological devices mediate a tenuous tethering that not only destabilizes relationships but also the individual ego. In The Years, characters often question their own distinctness and 30 Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Virginia Woolf: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) 2. 49 individuality when they step inside a moving vehicle. In 1907, “Maggie had been thinking something of the kind when the cab crossed the Serpentine…[s]he had been thinking, Am I that, or am I this? Are we one, or are we separate…something of the kind… „What is I?... “I”…‟ ” (TY 131). In the 1930s, Peggy sits with Eleanor in a cab on their way to the family party that closes the book, “She was alone with Eleanor in the cab. And they were passing houses. Where does she begin, and where do I end? ” (TY 317). Sitting in a cab makes both Maggie and Peggy uncertain of the boundary of their bodies. Sharing a space, and a trajectory of movement brings into question distinctness and individuality. In the examples cited from Woolf‟s diary and To the Lighthouse, a person in a moving vehicle loses the outer trappings of their identity and becomes merely “a traveler” or “a voyager” when they go aboard. As an observer, one begins to feel a certain permeability of the ego, which is perhaps why these questions are brought up. A similar de-stabilization takes place where it becomes possible, by wandering the streets of London, to be simultaneous oneself and not oneself. The lack of unity does not only exist within the social bodies, but carries into the individual self as well. The urban topography of the London streets here provides the field of tethering that induces permeability around the person. In her essay “Street Haunting,” Woolf writes of the effect of shutting the door to one‟s room, and venturing out into London on a winter night. When the door is shut on us…the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all those wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness…the eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure…the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks…content still with surfaces only. (CE4, 156) 50 Using “we” for the observing (almost Emersonian) eye rambling the streets of London, Woolf suggests the augmentation not only of her own, but of the identity of all those who would attempt this “street haunting.” The “we” used blurs the line between the reading and writing consciousnesses on this “adventure,” a blurring that will carry to herself and the people she meets on the streets. First “the door is shut,” and one is freed from the habits and rooms that contain personal idiosyncrasies to become only an observer, an eye. The “oyster of perceptiveness” separates out from the “wrinkles and roughnesses” and takes to the streets. The eye tethers briefly with the people and objects it meets with, but being “content…with surfaces” it does not seek after depths or insight. Zwerdling writes, “the „eye‟ in this passage is I think meant to be read as the antithesis of „I.‟ For the self could be a prison...”31 In a way, physical movement limits the depth of mental involvement, yet surface observation does not completely obliterate the “I.” Breaking out of the “prison” of self is only temporary, a brief forgetting of ego as one turns outward to receive the world. By the insistence on the moment of encounter, street haunting disregards personal history, the memory that so wholly comprise the I, and limits the “I” to only one function, that of the observing consciousness. Because of its constant engagement in observation, the eye and the “I” are tethered to the other people met upon the roads of wintry London. It allows a brief escape from one‟s own life by tethering it to the lives of others. As Woolf writes of those she meets upon the street, 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 moments the bodies and minds of others…and what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality… (CE4, 165) 31 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 13. 51 Walking the streets of London, self-identity is unsettled by the “illusion” of being able to escape the self and “put on briefly” like a cloak the “bodies and minds of others.” The personality is not a “straight line,” but a topographical web like the interlocking linked paths of London streets; the story of one‟s own life is not a forward one-way road, but a place, a “habitation”, with innumerable possibilities simultaneously contained within it. It even has other beings dwelling there, and past versions of oneself. Hermione Lee writes, “London was [Woolf‟s] own past, which she traced and retraced, meeting her previous selves as she went. It unsettled identity, turned her from a writer, wife, sister, aunt, friend, woman, into an unobserved observer.”32 The language of street haunting brings back the “voyager alighting on a distant planet,” the planet here being England. And those aliens are Londoners, neighbors who have lived lives simultaneously with our own. Indeed those aliens become a part of oneself, a character one might take on, just as “writer, wife, aunt, friend, woman” are all characters taken on by the “observer.” The “threading” of subjectivities is accomplished by devices that make disparate people aware of their shared existence. With the thread of awareness, the self takes on a quality of permeability; the eye and the “I” both open up. The passage form A Room of One’s Own, where the “girl in patent leather boots” and the “young man in a maroon overcoat…got into the taxi” and the “unity of mind” that restores the “unity of mind” to the narrator is an image that involves a combination of these themes. The permeability of egos upon a device of transportation is made materially manifest as man and woman step into one cab and fuse into a symbol of the androgynous, hybrid mind. The material permeability of the person as he or she enters the flow of London is also present in Clarissa Dalloway‟s thought, “that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things here, then, she survived” (MD 7). One survives by 32 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) 545. 52 imparting a little of one‟s own substance into the streets, leaving the trace of one‟s existence amidst the flow of life. This chapter examines how embedded technologies change how people understand their relations to one another and to their city in Woolf‟s fiction. Woolf responds to devices of transportation by crafting an aesthetic that tethers disparate people in the city of London into a plurality. The linkage is based on the moment of encounter, on the physical presence, and the devices involved are the ordinary omnibuses, and motorcars that course through the streets of London. These tenuous conditions for linkage make for a fleeting bond, and the preciousness of the present moment turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. Into the stream of London life, one may release the history, failures and successes that accrue over a life time. A diary entry written a few weeks before Woolf‟s death reads “I mark Henry James‟s sentence: Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable.”33 The serviceability of observation perhaps lies entirely in the escape from the self; perhaps it is this displacement of Woolf‟s concerns that Morris saw and capitalized upon when she wrote her introduction. 33 “Saturday 8 March 1941,” Anne Olivier Bell, ed., A Moment’s Liberty: the Shorter Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: the Hogarth Press, 1990) 503. 53 CONCLUSION MOVING TOWARD STILLNESS Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say, this is it… I‟m looking; but that‟s not it – that‟s not it? What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is “it” … It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved.34 - Diary, Saturday 27 February 1926 Midway through this thesis I yielded to the temptation of writing again to Ursula K. LeGuin, if only to see her response to the idea that Virginia Woolf had a penchant for science fiction. She wrote back (again to my surprise), this time with a challenge: “The next people you will have to prove were science fictionally inclined are Shelley + Housman.”35 This makes me think, what, other than for the pure pleasure of finding patterns, would be the point of proving that Shelley and Housman are science fictionally inclined? Indeed, what is the point of suggesting that Virginia Woolf is science fictionally inclined? All writers to some extent live in a technological world; some of them ignore the implications of those technologies blissfully, and others turn these technologies into tools of the imagination. 34 Anne Olivier Bell, ed., A Moment’s Liberty: the Shorter Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: the Hogarth Press, 1990) 207. 35 Ursula K. LeGuin. Letter to the author. 15 March 2010. 54 This thesis looks for the glue that holds vision and material together, for the links that tie people to one another and to their world. Through much of Woolf‟s writing, technological devices are that glue (or at least, one form of that glue). In her fiction, these devices structure the experience of the ordinary life as well as the visionary. Woolf‟s fiction is not science fiction, though there is a resemblance between the two that lies in a similar movement of mind, in the desire to know the other. Harold Bloom, in the introduction to his collection of critical essays on Ursula K. LeGuin, writes, “no one else now among us matches [LeGuin] at rendering freely that image of the thing we cannot see.”36 Likewise the first chapter chronicles Virginia Woolf‟s attempts to see “the thing we cannot see” – not an alien, but merely the person beside oneself. Or to rephrase, the desire to meet the alien is in fact, Lily‟s desire to understand Mrs. Ramsay, to access that inaccessible interiority of the other person. For both LeGuin and Woolf, the quest to seeing clearer and deeper becomes, in the end, a question of seeing with words. Woolf employs technological devices to shake us out of the complacency of ordinary seeing and, through new and fantastical insights, adopt novel relations with the object. Even though words are not as selfevident as pictures are, they can be repositories of other subjectivities; they can contain the mood and the rhythm of other personalities. What emerges in the effort to see the thing unseen, to counter this myopia of the mind is a vision – a fiction – of unity, and a necessary one. In chapter two argues that embedded technological devices structure the way people relate to one another in Woolf‟s writing. The fundamental element of human relations is exemplified by the scenes one encounters in a motorcar, by the people one meets on an omnibus, and by the airplane that flies overhead. Technology affects how we understand our link to the 36 Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” Ursula K. LeGuin: Modern Critical Perspectives (New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2000) 12. 55 world. These linkages even blur the boundaries of the individual – and Woolf found great use and relief in the self-forgetting it allowed. Vision of unity and connection is hard earned in both cases. The desire and movement toward unity and connection is ceaseless. One type of unity is centered in the mind and the vision, while the other is based in the material body and in things. But Woolf, that “restless searcher,” seeks community in both arenas. There is of course, a third option, the option of no movement, of stillness. Francois Mauriac called Virginia Woolf one of the writers who “are moving towards silence.”37 And it is silence, stillness, and the suspension of all movement that is not included in this thesis. Perhaps that is the answer to all the riddles of unity – instead of moving in either body or mind, to simply be still. But perhaps that answer would obliterate these novels and letters and essays, so full of momentum with their passionate search for connection. To end then, after a long explication of movement with the idea of stillness: or as the epigraph puts it, that “the thing in itself is enough: satisfactory; achieved.” 37 Francois Mauriac, Mémoires Intérieurs, trans. 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Kiely, Robert. Beyond egotism: the fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2003. --- Letter to the Author. 12 May 2009. --- Letter to the Author. 15 March 2010. --- Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator and the Mutinous Crew. Portland, OR: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1988. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007. Mauriac, Francois. Mémoires Intérieurs. New York: Goode & Spottiswoode, 1960. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Morris, Jan, ed. Travels with Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1993. Nussbaum, Martha. “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf‟s To the Lighthouse.” New Literary History (Autumn 1995): 731-753 58 Olson, Liesl M. “Virginia Woolf‟s „cotton wool of daily life.‟” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (Winter 2002-2003): 42-65. Otis, Laura. Membranes: metaphors of invasion in nineteenth-century literature, science, and politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. --- “The Metaphoric Circuit: Organic and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002). Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Science Fiction: the Stories of Now.” New Scientist 2726. 16 September 2009. Smythe, Karen. “Virginia Woolf‟s Elegiac Enterprise.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (Autumn 1992): 64-79. Stapledon, Olaf. An Olaf Stapledon Reader. Ed. Robert Crossley. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. --- Starmaker. 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