Technological Devices as Literary Devices in Virginia Woolf-1

Mr. Bankes‟s Telephone & Lily Briscoe‟s X-ray Vision Technological devices as literary devices in Virginia Woolf 2010 ABSTRACT Technological devices and metaphors have been embedded in Virginia Woolf‟s writing since early in her career; they form a recurring motif that runs through her novels, essays, and personal writing. Though critical analysis of her work has usually taken a philosophical, psychological, or phenomenological approach, recent critics have re-evaluated the impact of twentieth century technologies on the aesthetic approach of modernist writers, Woolf in particular. This project will take that scholarship as a basis and examine how technological devices mediate relationships in the private and public worlds of Virginia Woolf. The texts that I will consider include the novels To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Years, the essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, as well as her diaries, letters, and the incomplete memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” The continuum of private to public writings spanned by these texts, the years they cover in Woolf‟s career and the consistent thread of technological devices that runs through them demonstrate the extent to which technology permeated Woolf‟s thinking. Woolf‟s technological devices link and unify characters in personal relationships or as a social body. The limitations inherent in these devices also reflect the limits and the tenuousness of human relationships. In the introduction I will give a brief history of how I came to relate Virginia Woolf with science and technology. It will then offer a critical background of studies involving Woolf and modern science in order to contextualize this project and to suggest a point of departure. In chapter one I examine how Woolf employs technological devices as literary devices to overcome obstacles to understanding and create a fiction of unity between separate characters. This crafted unity is central to Woolf‟s idea of freedom of the mind and is implicated in her meditations on art, feminism, and war. Though the ultimate unity between persons, eras, and perspectives may prove impossible, the redeeming movement of the imagination creates a necessary fiction to hold discontinuous parts together. In chapter two, technological devices tether different perspectives to form pluralities. Woolf uses devices of modern transportation to show that the fundamental element in all human relations is one‟s awareness of being alive at the same time and in the same space as others. Emerging from that is an understanding of the tenuousness that pervades all relationships, and a delight in the brief loss of ego that accompanies connection. Most relationships can be derived from the brief illusory tethering in which one is liberated from one‟s own body and mind. Though Woolf never commented explicitly on science and technology, the coherent patterns that emerge from examining how technological devices operate in her writing suggests that she had great sensitivity to the imaginative possibilities these technologies provide. Literature speaks back to science: with the devices of technology, Woolf‟s fiction redefines the relation of the mind to reality and refigures the boundaries of the individual. CONTENTS SHORT TITLES .............................................................................................................................. i INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................................. 8 CHAPTER TWO .......................................................................................................................... 32 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 53 WORKS CONSULTED ............................................................................................................... 56 i SHORT TITLES Parenthetical citations use the abbreviations below and refer to the following works by Virginia Woolf: CE:4 Collected Essays, Volume IV (New York: Hacourt, Brace & World, 1967) MB Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985) MD Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 2002) TG Three Guineas (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966) TTL To the Lighthouse (Orlando: Harvest Books, 2005) TY The Years (Orlando: Harvest Books, 2008) 1 INTRODUCTION THE (SCIENCE) FICTION OF VIRGINIA WOOLF It was a question, [Lily] remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken.1 - To the Lighthouse Science fiction introduced me to Virginia Woolf. I began with Ursula K. LeGuin, who is a well-regarded science fiction author whose most famous book, The Left Hand of Darkness, is a story of alien encounters and interstellar travel. LeGuin cited Woolf as an inspiration,2 thus my encounter with Woolf‟s writing came by the somewhat logical progression from my favorite science fiction author to her favorite author. Because of this trajectory of encounter, Virginia Woolf was, from the very beginning, linked to the idea of science in my mind. Virginia Woolf concludes her most famous polemic, A Room of One’s Own, with the image of a “girl in patent leather boots” and a “young man in a maroon overcoat” stepping into a taxi together.3 For the narrator, the sight reunites the genders of the mind; from it she concludes that the creative mind is androgynous in that it contains both a straightforward, masculine vigor, and an expansive and generative feminine warmth. LeGuin‟s Left Hand of Darkness, which takes place on the alien world of Gethen, materially manifests what Woolf metaphorizes in A Room of 1 TTL 56-7. LeGuin writes, “I find [Woolf‟s] thought and work wonderful in itself…[t]he rhythm of Woolf‟s prose is to my ear the subtlest and strongest in English fiction.” Ursula K. LeGuin, Steering the Craft (Portland, OR: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1988) 46-47. 3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929) 167. 2 2 One’s Own. That is to say, LeGuin populates Gethen with a race of androgynous beings. A male ambassador from earth must not only learn the culture of an alien race, but also to confront the deeply ingrained dualistic aspects of his own understanding, which is rooted in the separation of the sexes. The summer before beginning this thesis I wrote to LeGuin, listing a few of the themes and images that I thought she had in common with Virginia Woolf. She replied (to my surprise): Dear Shiwei Zhou, …Virginia Woolf? I love and admire her the most of any 20th century writer. My mother gave me A Room of One’s Own when I was 15 or 16 – it made me a feminist forever…some of the parallels you see are influence, not coincidence – her mind and her work are so infinitely rich, so generous – she makes all the men look just a little bit mean and self-centered…4 By LeGuin‟s own admission, it seems that feminism is the most explicit link between Woolf and herself, not science. Yet, like a conspiracy theorist, I could not stop seeing patterns. The use of technology to overcome great distances, which frequently appears in science fiction – with varying degrees of scientific accuracy – as can also be seen in Woolf. LeGuin‟s “ansible” makes simultaneous conversation possible across light-years without any lag time,5 and Woolf in her memoir wishes for a machine that she could plug into the wall and “listen in to the past…turn up August 1890” (MB 67). Another set of correspondences made me think again about the connections between Woolf and science. In 1937, British writer Olaf Stapledon published Starmaker, a work of science fiction in which the unnamed protagonist – in the form of a disembodied consciousness – 4 5 Ursula K. LeGuin, letter to the author, 12 May 2009. The underlined emphasis is hers. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2003) 276. 3 joins other explorers on a cosmic journey across time and space to find the ultimate creator, the Starmaker.6 The book is considered a classic of British science fiction and is taught at this university in a class on science fiction (along with LeGuin‟s Left Hand of Darkness, in fact). In July of 1937 Woolf wrote to Stapledon after reading his book: Dear Mr. Stapledon, I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.7 Stapledon had also read Woolf‟s The Years, published earlier that year. He replied, Dear Mrs. Woolf, It gives me great pleasure to know that you liked my book, and that some of the ideas in it fall in line with your own thought. The book falls very far short of my hopes for it, both in plan and expression, but I suppose that is almost inevitable. I have recently read "The Years" with delight, and also with despair and the thought of the contrast between your art and my own pedestrian method.8 6 Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker (New York: Dover Publications, 1968). Reproduced by Kim Stanley Robinson. “Science Fiction: the Stories of Now” New Scientist 2726 (16 September 2009) 8 Robert Crossley, ed., An Olaf Stapledon Reader (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997) 283-4. 7 4 That Woolf had corresponded with, and praised a science fiction writer for “grasping ideas that [she] had tried to express” was, for me, a sufficiently strong archival foothold to justify looking into the connections between Virginia Woolf and “Science.” I encountered this correspondence in Holly Henry‟s Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science. 9 Along with a few other critical works, Henry‟s book occupies the small yet persistent niche of criticism on Woolf that examines her interaction with scientific ideas and technological devices. During Woolf‟s lifetime, Einstein proposed his ideas of relativity, wireless broadcasting technologies came into use, and automobiles entered mass manufacture. Essays in the collection Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction examine how Woolf responds to new technologies such as the motorcar, radio, and wireless broadcasting, among others. Henry, in her book, looks especially at how the telescope shaped Woolf‟s narrative strategies and metaphors – what she calls Woolf‟s “global aesthetics.”10 Collectively, these critics have made a well-supported case for the interaction between specific scientific devices and ideas, and Woolf‟s body of work. The question of how to connect the “mass on the right hand with the mass on the left” – here between the masses of literature and science – is Lily Briscoe‟s, and it is mine. And the danger is the same, that “the unity of the whole might be broken,” – if there had been a unity to begin with. These critics have laid the groundwork and provided archival legitimacy in the study of how technological devices are embedded in Woolf‟s writing. My project will take theirs as a touchstone and pursue a different end. I do not intend to draw out the influence of a single scientific idea or technological device on Woolf‟s aesthetic, but rather to trace the pattern behind 9 Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Henry has an entire chapter in which she reads Woolf alongside Stapledon, which is why I do not include Stapledon as a large part of this thesis. 10 Ibid., 5. 5 technological devices that act as literary devices in her work. I will use the term“devices” in lieu of either “technologies” or “objects” to refer to the x-ray, the motorcar, the airplane, et cetera, partially because Woolf had used the term when she began The Waves and found it recalcitrant to her methods: “Several problems cry out at once to be solved…One wants some device which is not a trick”.11 Mainly, I use “devices” because of its neutrality in critical discourses that make use of Foucault‟s “technologies of the self”,12 or the ones that distinguish between “objects” and “things.”13 “Device” is also handily interchangeable between the modes of technology and literature. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “device” both in its technological manifestation – “an invention, contrivance; esp. a mechanical contrivance…for some particular purpose” – and its literary use – “a character, event, narrative technique, etc., used in order to bring about the desired effect.”14 As I am attempting to suggest the interaction between technology and literature, device becomes a ferry of meaning and connotation. I intend that, by focusing on technological devices, this analysis will not only engage itself with commentators who work especially with Woolf and technology, but also be in conversation with critics who approach Woolf from philosophical and phenomenological perspectives. This is partially because of the nature of the scientific devices themselves – “[t]here are codes by where our interpretive attention makes them meaningful.”15 Technological devices function in more than one code, or one discourse. I will draw on phenomenological and philosophical readings of Woolf because technological devices speak on matters of perception, 11 “Wednesday, 25 September 1929.” Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Leonard Woolf, ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 143. Cited by Beer, 78. 12 Lorraine Daston, et al., Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007) 198. 13 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001): 4. 14 “Device.” Oxford English Dictionary, Online edition, 2010. 15 Bill Brown. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001): 4. This is how Brown defines “objects,” and the definition is appropriate, though I am not using his term. 6 subjectivity, ethics, and power relations. But the philosophical and the phenomenological schools of interpretation are not the immediate context of this work. Because of the episodic nature of this thesis, I will occasionally switch between novels, and also from Woolf‟s fictional writings to her nonfiction. To borrow from Ann Banfield, the thesis is organized by the “repetition of themes, of images,” and “any chronologic will be ignored, any difference between individual works…like the unconscious in its ignorance of time.” 16 In the first chapter I will look at how Woolf uses technological devices as literary devices to overcome obstacles to understanding to create a fiction of unity between separate characters. Lily‟s x-ray and Mr. Bankes‟s telephone, among other technological devices, allow individual characters to realize his or her internal vision, to access the interiority of others, or to envision the vanished past. This crafted unity is central in Woolf‟s idea of freedom of the mind and implicated in her meditations on art, feminism, and war. Although the ultimate unity between persons, eras, and perspectives may prove impossible, the redeeming movement of the imagination creates a necessary fiction to hold discontinuous parts together. Chapter two will move from technologies that enable science fiction to actual technologies that restructure perception and social interaction. Omnibuses, motorcars, and airplanes link the people of London in tangible ways by making them aware of their shared, simultaneous existence. Woolf uses devices of modern transportation to show that the fundamental element in all human relations is one‟s awareness of being alive at the same time and in the same space as others. Emerging from that is an understanding of the tenuousness that pervades all relationships, and a delight in the brief loss of ego that accompanies connection. Most relationships can be derived from the brief illusory tethering in which one is liberated from 16 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) xiv. 7 one‟s own body and mind. Devices of transportation destabilize the self and relationships as it democratizes them. "Discontinuity" and "continuity,"17 are terms that have been applied to Virginia Woolf's narrative technique, but not to the network of scientific devices she mobilizes in her writing. Though Woolf did not comment explicitly on technology, devices of imagination and technology become co-extensive with one another in her work. She is not only modern for the narrative techniques she employs and the subjects she deals with, but also for of her sensitivity to the playful implications of technology. The possibilities offered by these technological devices form a springboard for Woolf‟s imagination – sometimes returning her to the present, sometimes launching her into the air. 17 Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf, the Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 145.