Abstract
Although the principle of ut pictura poesis had long lost its authority, in the early decades of the twentieth century the principle itself, no longer reliant on the classical axiom, seems to have regained its strength; for writers repeatedly projected themselves fictionally into their works in the guise of painters, on the assumption that the two media were essentially kindred. D. H. Lawrence, in his semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers, depicted his younger self as Paul Morel embarking on a career as a painter, long before he himself took up painting as an avocation;1 James Joyce entitled the fictionalised account of his own decision to become a writer A Portrait of the Artist …, naming his central character after the ‘cunning artificer’ Daedalus, whose artistic creations, according to legend, were so realistic that they appeared to come alive; and Virginia Woolf’s own attempt to reconstitute the English novel was projected into the figure of the painter Lily Briscoe, agonising over the structural composition of a canvas.
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Notes and References
D. H. Lawrence began painting only in 1926. Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel (Princeton, 1985), although acknowledging the identification of novelist with painter in the work of James, Lawrence and Woolf, dismisses it as a merely ‘decorative’ element (p. 17). In fact, in Henry James’ novels author identification is normally not with the artist but with the connoisseur, watching with interest the painter’s or sculptor’s progress, as in Roderick Hudson or The Sacred Fount.
See, among many such instances, Norman Cantor, Twentieth-Century Culture: modernism to deconstruction (New York, 1988), pp. 64f., who supports there the traditional view that the proliferation of photography made it ‘necessary for artists to move towards more nonrepresenta-tional portrayals because the camera coopted what had hitherto been the characteristic province of the painter, namely, to depict what the eye saw.’
Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (New York, 1983), pp. 165f., and on Dégas, pp. 202f. Rodin rejected the lesson offered by Muybridge, endorsing the established method of painting horses’ legs as splayed out, since, although inaccurate anatomically, it recreated the optical impression produced on the viewer.
Cf. Bram Dijkstra, Cubism, Steiglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, 1978), especially pp. 15f.
Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century (Chicago, 1983), pp. 43–4.
Umberto Eco, ‘Critique of the Image’, in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London, 1982);
Martin Jay, The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993), especially chapter 3.
Quotation from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London, 1939), p. 522, the Mary Colum reference from Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, op. cit., pp. 480, 647.
James Sully, Outlines of Psychology (London, 1884), p. 74. See also
George Johnson, ‘Virginia Woolf and Second Wave Psychology’, Twentieth Century Literature, 40 (1994), 139.
Quotations from Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, 1959), pp. 393, 450, 538;
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: a biography (New York, 1972) 2:19;
Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: a house of lions (New York, 1980), p. 255;
Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York, 1978), 2:482, 134–5;
Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick (eds), Bloomsbury/Freud: the letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25 (New York, 1985), p. 264. James Strachey also mentions her refusal to consult a psychiatrist for her own disorders. There is an interesting discussion of her relationship to psychoanalysis from an exclusively gender viewpoint in
Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (London, 1933, orig. 1921), p. 13.
Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge, 1989), discusses in general terms the need of the Modernist poet to employ defensive strategies against the sense of dispossession inflicted on the arts.
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), trans. Joan Riviere (London, 1923), p. 314. As this is a crucial passage, I have used here the translation first published in 1922, which would have been available to writers of that time, rather than that of The Collected Works, of which volume 16, containing these lectures, appeared only in 1957. Reviere’s was the translation quoted by Roger Fry in his attempt at a rebuttal.
Peter Fuller, Art and Psychoanalysis (London, 1980).
Albert Modell, The Erotic Motive in Literature (New York, 1919), pp. 11, 123, 146. For studies of the effect of psychology on art and its theory of the evolution of the artist in society, see
Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London, 1953), and
Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudian-ism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, 1957).
See especially, Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London, 1975) and A Map of Misreading (London, 1975); and
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a selection (London, 1977) and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London, 1977).
Recorded in Peter Gay, Freud: a life for our time (New York, 1988), pp. 214–15.
Tristan Tzara, Zurich Chronicle (1915–19). On Dadaism, see
C. W. E. Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London, 1972);
Hans Richter, Dada: art and anti-art (Oxford, 1978);
Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London, 1980);
Alan Young, Dada and After: extremist modernism and English literature (Manchester, 1981).
Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique (1889). See also
H. N. Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (Ann Arbor, 1979).
A. Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (Ann Arbor, 1981), p. 26 (italics in the original).
Quoted in Dawn Ades, Dau (London, 1988), p. 50.
Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (New York, 1942). There is an analysis of the function of such legends in Surrealism at large in
Whitney Chadwick, Myth in Surrealist Painting (Ann Arbor, 1980).
Archie K. Loss, Joyce’s Visible Art: the work of Joyce and the visual arts, 1904–1922 (Ann Arbor, 1984) attempts, in a brief study, to connect his work with the art of the fin de siècle, usually on the basis of rather farfetched thematic connections. See also
Maria E. Kronegger, James Joyce and Associated Image-makers (New Haven, 1968).
Those incidents, recorded in Bell, Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 1:42–4, have long been recognised as related to her subsequent sexual frigidity, although no connection has been made, to the best of my knowledge, with the Louis incident. See Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: a writer’s life (New York, 1984), p. 156.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 61–2.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (London, 1977).
Bettina L. Knapp, Word, Image, Psyche (Alabama, 1985), p. 173.
Bell, Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 1:89, 143; 2:7; Woolf, Diary, op. cit., 1:228, and The Moment and Other Essays (New York, 1948, orig. 1925), p. 178. Further discussion of her lack of responsiveness to painting can be found in the essays by various contributors in Diane F. Gillespie (ed.), The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf (Columbia, 1993), and in Gillespie’s own book, The Sister Arts: the writing and painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracus, 1988). The more traditional view that Woolf was powerfully affected by the 1910 exhibition whose influence, it is suggested, remained dormant in her consciousness, remains dominant in
Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton, 1985), pp. 62f.
Her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, first delivered at Cambridge in 1924. This point is also made in Peter Faulkner (ed.), Modernism (London, 1977), pp. 34–5.
Mark Shechner, Joyce in Nighttown: a psychoanalytic inquiry into ‘Ulysses’ (Berkeley, 1974);
Sheldon R. Brivic, Joyce Between Freud and Jung (London, 1980).
James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 155–75, citations from pp. 174–5. All quotations from Ulysses are from the revised Penguin version, the carefully corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler.
Dorrit Cohen, Transparent Minds: narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction (Princeton, 1978), especially pp. 86–8.
Carlos Rojas, Salvador Dali: or the art of spitting on your mother, trans. Alma Amell (Pennsylvania, 1993), p. 113. On parent-child relationships in psychoanalytic theory, see especially the chapter on ‘The Transformation of Puberty’ in Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905).
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London, 1949), 3: 896.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, 1948), especially p. 21.
Hugo Ball, ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ (1916), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: an anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 51.
Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York, 1967), especially pp. 192f.
Recalled in Lothar Schreyer, Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich, 1956), p. 168.
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Roston, M. (2000). Woolf, Joyce, and Artistic Neurosis. In: Modernist Patterns. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389403_6
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