Abstract
‘The modern art of the novel’, writes Adriana Cavarero, ‘loves to look inside, to excavate appearances in order to discover the interiority of the subject’, a love Cavarero also associates with modernity’s ‘loss of the world.’1 Against this interiorized being Cavarero puts forth a ‘narratable’ but not necessarily narrated self, a self she aligns with who as opposed to what we are, with the desire to hear one’s story over and above that story’s contents, and with solicitation over introspection. This ‘self — to the extent to which a who is not reducible to a what — has a totally external and relational reality’, Cavarero writes. ‘Both the exhibitive, active self and the narratable self are utterly given over [consegnati] to others. In this total giving-over, there is therefore no identity that reserves for itself protected spaces or a private room of impenetrable refuge for self-contemplation. There is no interiority that can imagine itself [autoaffabularsi] to be an inexpressible value.’2 The who of which Cavarero speaks need not be located in a particular text. Instead, ‘The strange possibility of leaving the text out of consideration means simply that it is not necessary for us to know the other’s story, in order to know that the other is a unique being whose identity is rooted in this story.’ 3 What Cavarero here moves towards is something not dissimilar to that intensity without attachment to which Henry James describes himself as tending prior to building his house of fiction: a who withdrawn from worldly content, but whose reality, for Cavarero, is wholly ‘external and relational.’
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Notes
Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 140; p. 41.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, in A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, ed. by Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 1–115 (p. 53). Further references to this edition are given in the text as R.
David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 175.
James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 649.
Virginia Woolf, The Years, ed. by Jeri Johnson (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 17. Further references to this edition are given in the text as Y.
Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, ‘Introduction’, in Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems 1800–1950, ed. by Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–40 (p. 36; p. 10).
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. by Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966–7), I (1966), pp. 46–53 (p. 46).
Levenson, Michael, ‘From the Closed Room to an Opening Sky: Vectors of Space in Eliot, Woolf and Lewis’, Critical Quarterly, 49 (2007), pp. 2–20, (p. 5). Further references given in the text as FCR.
Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987) p. 184.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991; repr. 1993), p. 105.
Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors, and Passages’, Architectural Design, 4 (1978), pp. 267–278 (p. 267). Further references to this article are given in the text as FDP.
Raymond Williams, ‘When was Modernism?’, in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 31–36 (p. 34).
Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (London: John Murray, 1864), p. 102.
Quoted in Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 193.
Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 37–48 (p. 45).
Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin: Selling Out (Siders)’, in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. by Pamela L. Caughie (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 3–36 (p. 25).
Woolf , ‘Oxford Street Tide’, in Virginia Woolf, The London Scene, 2nd edn (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982), pp. 16–23 (p. 16; p. 17). Further references given in the text as OST.
Jane Lewty, ‘Broadcasting Modernity: Eloquent Listening in the Early Twentieth Century’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002), p. 250.
In Samuel Beckett’s story ‘Yellow’ in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), Belacqua dies during an operation to remove his toe: the narrative notably remarks that ‘They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!.’
See Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 164.
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. xxxix.
Gillian Beer, ‘Wireless: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism’, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 149–166 (p. 150).
Susan Squire, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 61.
British Broadcasting Corporation, Broadcasting House (London: BBC, 1932), p. 24.
David Trotter, ‘The Person in the Phone Booth’, London Review of Books, 32 (2010), pp. 20–22 <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/david-trotter/the-person-in-the-phone-booth>.
Cohen, Coyle, and Lewty , ‘Introduction: Signing On’, in Broadcasting Modernism, ed. by Debra Rae Cohen, Michel Coyle and Jane Lewty, Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), pp. 2–10 (p. 3).
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p. 19.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Craftsmanship’, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. by Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966–7), II (1966), pp. 245–251 (p. 246). Further references given in the text as CR. These are also pressures that apply to the telephone. In Henry Green’s Living (1929), a character takes offence over a comment made over a phone: ‘It beats me how he’s the cheek to say that over a public service like the telephone.’
See Henry Green, Living, in Loving, Living, Party Going (London: Vintage, 2005), pp. 205–382 (p. 253).
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 151.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–1984), V (1984), p. 79.
See Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in The Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 416.
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© 2014 Alice Gavin
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Gavin, A. (2014). Intramedium. In: Literature and Film, Dispositioned. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295453_3
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