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Reality and Virginia Woolf
Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2003 by Phillips, Brian
Coleridge writes of the "alienation" and the "utter aloofness" of the poet's feelings. For Woolf, Shakespeare's mind is "unimpeded" by the merely personal. His mind does not remain aloof from the page, it enters the page and is absorbed in it, because it is not blocked by the ego. This is an important distinction, for although there is a tendency to combine all modernist doctrines of impersonality together and roughly annex them to "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Woolf's will resist the comparison. For her impersonality is not the extinction of personality, it is the diffusion of the self into the work. The self which is active, awake, insistent on its own concerns, will throttle the mechanism and impede the clarity of art, but the self which is responsive, unconscious, and content will embody its thought in art, and sink into every page. We know nothing about Shakespeare, she writes, but we sense him everywhere in his work. We are forever about to discover him; we are forever missing him. Kierkegaard describes an artist who, asked to paint the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea, painted the entire wall red, and explained that the Israelites had just gone across, and the Egyptians drowned. Shakespeare is always disappearing beyond the margin and beneath the page.
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In an essay called "Personalities," Woolf writes:
These great artists who manage to infuse the whole of themselves into their works, yet contrive to universalise their identity so that, though we feel Shakespeare everywhere about, we cannot catch him at the moment in any particular spot. . . . The people whom we admire most as writers, then, have something elusive, enigmatic, impersonal about them. ... In ransacking their drawers we shall find out little about them. all has been distilled into their books.
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For a novelist, the question of distilling one's own personality into one's books is closely connected with the problem of portraying character. Bernard, the novelist in The Waves, finds his personality so vast and contradictory that the moment he asks "What am I? This?" he must answer, "No, I am that." And yet in the presence of other people he begins uncontrollably inventing stories to explain them, gives them little settings and histories, imagines what they are thinking, and longs to know them in detail; he is "impatient of solitude." Woolf envisions character as a will-o'-the-wisp whispering in the novelist's ear-"Catch me if you can"-and then speeding away, leading the writer on a long chase through the novel. Character is the motivation and the goal of fiction. On this point Woolf is in rare agreement with Arnold Bennett, who wrote, "The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else." One cannot portray character and portray oneself at the same time-this is Woolf's reservation about Charlotte Bronte. Personality is what must be vacated for character to come into existence. And yet if a writer succeeds in catching the will-o'-the-wisp she will go on existing, elusive and transformed, in the character she has created.
