Abstract
Woolf’s experimentation with representing the past and her engagement with historical narrative becomes more conspicuous, because it takes a more ‘realistic’ form in The Years, the last novel to be published in her lifetime, crucially, at the dawn of the Second World War, in 1937.2 In this ostentatiously historical novel, dates, facts and material details prevail, in contrast to The Waves, a modernist achievement of poetic suggestiveness and narrative fluidity, which immediately preceded it, or the surreal imagination and satire of Orlando, her first historiographical narrative. Woolf’s apparent turn to literary naturalism may seem all the more paradoxical considering that, as we saw in Chapter 4, she had famously castigated the ‘materialist’ verisimilitude which permeated the fiction of the ‘Edwardian’ writers in her essays ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in 1924 and earlier still in ‘Modern Novels’(1919), a slightly different version of ‘Modern Fiction’. In all these essays, Woolf accuses the Edwardian novelists, and in particular Mr Wells, Mr Galsworthy and Mr Bennett, for claiming to depict real life, the subject of the novel, purely with reference to ‘facts’, the external environment, manners and material details, instead of looking within, at how the minds of real people registers life.3
[The] task is reserved for a science of history whose subject matter is not a tangle of purely factual details, but consists rather of the numbered group of threads that represent the weft of the past as it feeds into the warp of the present. […] The subject matter of history, once released from pure facticity, needs no appreciation. For it offers not vague analogies to the present, but constitutes the precise dialectical problem that the present is called upon to resolve.
(W. Benjamin)1
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Notes
Jeri Johnson usefully discusses at length Woolf’s debate with Edwardian novelists in ‘The Years: Introduction’, in Julia Briggs (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works (London: Virago Press, 1994), pp. 305–15.
Virginia Woolf, ‘First Essay’, in The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 9.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Vintage, 1992).
Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (1922), in Selected Writings 1, p. 356.
Cf. Woolf, The Years, pp. 154, 408. Also cf. Cecilia Sjoholm’s interesting article ‘The Até of Antigone; Lacan, Heidegger and Sexual Difference’, New Formations 35 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 122–33.
Benjamin, ‘Review of Beguin’s Arne romantique et le rêve’(1939), in Selected Writings 4, p. 155.
More precisely: ‘The Interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’, in Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 769.
Benjamin, ‘Central Park’ (1939) in Selected Writings 4, pp. 184–5.
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© 2010 Angeliki Spiropoulou
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Spiropoulou, A. (2010). Dreaming, History and the Visions of the Obscure in The Years. In: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250444_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250444_7
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