Verbal Painting in “Blue & Green” and “Monday or Tuesday”

Abstract

There has been much attention given to the lyricism in Virginia Woolf’s novels as a technique to explore the representation of consciousness: the “Time Passes” section in To the Lighthouse; the interlude passages in The Waves; and Isa the poet in Between the Acts. Even in her first novel, The Voyage Out, there are stream of consciousness passages depicting Rachel Vinrace’s reveries about the Amazon River as meditations on silence and self. There has been much less attention given to lyricism in her short fiction, perhaps because the issue of the short story as form becomes so problematic with Woolf; often her better known stories, “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens,” are questioned in terms of being short stories at all. Does a woman’s contemplation of a spot on a wall create enough “plot” to constitute a short story? Does the narrative “voice” of a snail suggest that a story is being told? Even some of her lesser-known short stories are labeled as sketches or caricatures rather than short stories. “A Haunted House,” “Blue & Green,” “Monday or Tuesday,” and “The String Quartet” are stories that seem to defy definition as sketches or caricatures or short stories.¹ To read these pieces is not to accumulate details in the conventional narrative sense of plot and characterization, but to experience a visionary moment that “startles us into a flash of understanding,” as Woolf says in “On Re-reading Novels,” one that replicates an immediate emotion, a sense perception, some heightened sensibility or cognition (E3 340).