"Telling brutal things": colonialism, Bloomsbury and the crisis of narration in Leonard Woolf's "A Tale Told by Moonlight" - Critical Essay

Criticism, Spring, 2001 by Anindyo Roy

Woolf first started corresponding with Strachey in January 1905 and continued writing to him until 1909, after which his letters grew progressively infrequent. To the modern reader, these letters bear evidence to a whole range of personal emotions generated by the various kinds of duties he undertook as a public administrator, articulated with a rare sense of intimacy, provocation, and reticence. What also emerges intermittently in the letters is Woolf's persistent questioning of the "real," a word he uses frequently both in his letters and later in "A Tale Told by Moonlight." The word resonates with a particular urgency in the letters as Woolf attempts to place his own experiences in the colony against the philosophical debates that he and his friends had engaged in at Cambridge in the early years of the century. Those debates, which had preoccupied the members of the exclusive circle led by G. E. Moore, the philosopher, centered around the question of "the good," an issue that had also been at the core of Moore's philosophical work, Principia Ethica, whose first edition appeared in 1903 when Woolf was still at Cambridge. I will return to Moore's ideas later in this essay, but here I wish to emphasize the colonial route through which Woolf channels the question of the "real" back to the metropolis, testing the epistemological limits of the concept against his own experiences in the colony.

Beginning with his letter of July 7, 1907 and continuing up to November 25, 1908, Woolf's reflective stance on the "real" takes on a form of haunting: unsure of how to begin articulating ideas about this "real," which increasingly seemed to him to be no longer comprehensible in terms laid out in the metropolis, he searches for an alternative that would allow him to move beyond the conceptual categories of metropolitan philosophical reasoning into the colonial world of "affect" in which he dwelt daily as an outsider. He first brings up the question about the "real" in a letter to Strachey where he describes his reactions to E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey, which he had been reading while performing his official duties:

   The fact is I don't think he knows what reality is, & as for experience,
   the poor man does not realize that practically it does not exist. Still his
   mind interests me, its curious way of touching on things in the rather
   precise & charming way in which his hands (I remember) used to touch things
   vaguely. (12)

In these general impressions, Woolf characterizes Forster's work as "fading into humour and the dimmer ghosts of unrealities," suggesting indirectly that the failure of form in the novel was due to Forster's inability to know "reality." Moore and Forster shared a Platonic approach to the real: both were concerned with the separate existence beyond human consciousness of something real, which is a major theme of the novel The Longest Journey. (13) For Woolf, on the other hand, that "real" resolutely signified something that was vividly and inescapably present to the consciousness, which is emphasized throughout in his letters to Strachey. However, in his comments on Forster, Woolf does not raise this point, but goes on to qualify his dismissal of Forster by saying that, despite the shortcomings of his novel, Forster's mind still interested him: something about the movement of "touching on things" that he intuited in Forster's narrative indicated that, while "reality" might have eluded him, his work, like his habit of "vaguely" touching on things, displayed a kind of subtle tactility that gave objects a presence both precise and indeterminate. To push the sensory body into the domain of narrativity through a paradoxical tactility involving both precision and inexactitude becomes a way for Woolf to establish a possible link between the "real" and the domain of "affect" registered both physically and emotionally. In fact, the act of touching, understood as an apprehension of surfaces, conveyed to Woolf a certain motion of tactile feeling that pointed to the "real," without necessarily moving beyond that surface to penetrate the core.