and virginia woolf | william bain

And Virginia Woolf

William Bain

Whether we look on it in a quotidian, common sense way, or in a specialized discussion on, say, topography or geometry, space is there. In literary terms, Virginia Woolf’s interest in both everyday and scientific perspectives is well known. Of course all writers reflect the scientific and academic views of their times in some way. Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla, for example, might be likened to Woolf’s fiction in this regard.

In any event it is well known that the poetic arts of the first quarter of the twentieth century were cognizant of the scientific breakthroughs involved in the 1905 publication of four major papers by Albert Einstein on physical relativity. Born in 1882, as the daughter of a relatively wellto-do family, the author of To the Lighthouse would thus have been 23 years old in the annus mirabilis of Einstein’s publications in Annalen der Physik. However, Woolf’s opus is a very extensive palimpsest made up of diaries and letters in addition to the fiction, and care must be taken as to how we interpret words like space, or atom in her texts. As Michael Whitworth notes in the Oxford Authors in Context Virginia Woolf (2005) with regard to Night and Day, which was published in 1919, some of the ideas of its main protagonist “are informed not only by the vast scale of the universe, but by popular science expositions of the finite velocity of light.”

Light of course travels in or through space. In keeping with the theme of space, then, I want to look very briefly at a relatively early flash fiction piece by Woolf. “Monday or Tuesday.” It is the title story for her 1921 collection of short stories. It opens with a description that incorporates her close attention to the workings of the natural world along with what I see as a nod to the sciences. Beginning the story we read:

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky.

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t 20 And a series of interrogative comments and descriptions then slowly frames a one-page bird’s-eye view story where, “White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains.”

Above I referred to the piece as flash fiction. But of course that term had not yet come into use, as far as I know. But consider: a sky absorbed in itself. And in movement. Implicit in this writing is a palimpsest of ancient scientific texts and, in its original context, of contemporary scientific texts. Woolf then punctuates the text by half a dozen mentions of “truth”, which of course is another way of saying being—or perhaps space. In the end, for her heron, perhaps currently for our drones, “space rushes” (as the story continues) and “the sky veils her stars, then bares them.”

Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short fiction Woolf published in her lifetime. Her experimental fiction in that book is generally seen as avant-texte for the later fiction, especially perhaps the novels. A second story in Monday or Tuesday, “Kew Gardens” (begun 1917, first published 12 May1919), contains more sustained sections of poetic/scientific writing about Nature. The beginning:

From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

Thus we find (a) space in which natural things grow, an organic space touched it seems by a miniature spectrum of three primary colors. As the passage continues, the colors are spoken of as “lights” and we are told “the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes

of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” As with the previously mentioned story however, a dissonant “truth” enters the text as we eavesdrop on the conversations of the different characters that enter the Edenic opening section. This time the polyphony involves more than human voices, however, for as the narration moves toward closure it dollies back, as one might phrase it, to open itself synaesthetically to the “wordless voices”—what today amounts to noise pollution—of the machines surrounding the space of Kew Gardens.

Virginia Woolf’s visions of the world, her “sky-writing” as some of her language is sometimes referred to, these things hold a particularly rare depth of thought. A heron shaking space off its wings—it is, you must admit, a curious way of phrasing a heron’s liftoff.

Traducción al castellano en: www.tusitalaproject.com

William Bain

Some of William Bain’s written texts and small format abstract drawings have appeared online or on paper in Abstract|Ext, Barcelona Ink, On-Barcelona, Danse Macabre, DeLuge Journal, Ferbero, larealidadnoexiste.com, Red River Review, Tusitalaproject.com, Wild Roof Journal, and Zone, among others.

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