Virginia Woolf in the Pay of Booksellers: commerce, privacy, professionalism, Orlando

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2002 by Patrick Collier

Woolf's play with this "cypher language" in Orlando dramatizes the benefits and costs of modernism, whose experimental language may represent modes of experience that evade conventional language, but at the cost of a loss of accessibility, of communicability--a loss, in short, of audience. The ending of this passage is a tease: even the most active and open-minded reader is unlikely to decode "Rattigan Glumphoboo." And the narrator's layering of audiences in the passage (Shel, the telegraph operator, the biographer/narrator of Orlando, the reader) places this secret language in a suitably complex, multiply mediated exchange in which, nonetheless, only one reader truly has access to it.

Professionalism

Woolf's model reader-writer relationship stands considerably closer to the intimate contact between Shel and Orlando than to the potentially deforming, multiply mediated situation described in "The Patron and the Crocus." Indeed, it is the presence of layers of literary middlemen that pose the threat in that essay and others. These middlemen are what Woolf would have described as professionals--people whose writing, reading, and discussion of literature are too closely identified with or too heavily invested in their status as paid, public pursuits. She figures literary professionals almost without exception as obstacles to writers, readers, and literature in spite of the fact that Woolf was by almost any definition one of them. She dealt with this fact almost constantly in her reviews and criticism of the mid to late twenties, coming up with various ways to forswear her own authority and professionalism and to situate herself as an amateur, a confidant, a conversant--anything but an authority or a professional. (14)

Gail McDonald has discussed the way T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound led the way in "professionalizing" literature in the 1910s and 1920s, using their criticism as a way of disseminating a specialized vocabulary and connecting an ethic of rigor to the creation and appreciation of literature. They fought against what they perceived as the feminization of literature as both occupation and pastime, striving to imbue literary activity with the authority enjoyed by the sciences (McDonald viii). Like his counterparts in law, medicine, and the sciences, the man of letters was to be a "specialist" who maintained "standards"; Eliot decried the "slackness" he associated with contemporary British culture and with literary journalists, whose "mixed motives" and "dodging of standards" prevented them from attaining sufficient expertise in their subject ("Professional"). McDonald argues that this strain in Eliot's and Pound's campaign for modernism has its roots in American academic debates about how the humanities should be taught and studied in universities, debates between "artes liberales" advocates, who suggested an "amateur spirit" in which education indulged the love of learning without utilitarian considerations, and "liberal-free" theorists, who succeeded in setting up the humanities on a scientific model, in which individual scholars engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth through something approximating the scientific method. This background, McDonald argues, also illuminates why Pound, Eliot, and others were