V. Woolf is one of those writers you don’t just breeze through; her stream-of-consciousness writing style isn’t the easiest to hold in your hands and store away. You’ve got to worm from beginning to end, then back to the beginning and so on until you can surpass that full stop with some semblance of understanding—that is, when you do reach the full stop—semicolons are happily dispersed throughout a single sentence to wind you from here to there and tangentially everywhere.
I’m usually a quick reader, but committing to Woolf means vowing patience, embracing the snail’s crawl and never getting too eager to finish. If at any point I notice myself itching for Moments of Being to come to an end, I know it’s time to step away. This is not the case for most authors, but it happens to be the case for the authors who seem to leave some kind of imprint on my writing—Woolf, Márquez, Vuong, Pynchon. Can you tell I enjoy prose and poetry? I crave melody in writing. But perhaps what I most crave is the time. To spend an hour wrangling with a paragraph, both the author’s purpose in including it and the effect it’s leaving on me as a reader, means allowing the words to fall apart—to break away—and to be put back together in some coherent way, whether or not that coherence was intended in the first place.
“For he was not, as I am, a breaker off of single words, or sentences, not a note taker,” writes Woolf, referring here to her Cambridge-educated brother Thoby, who was ruthless in his assertion that everything was in Shakespeare to a point that it exasperated her. Thoby loved the “natural inhumanity in Shakespeare,” but “on the other hand, when Desdemona wakes again” (in Shakespeare’s Othello), Thoby considers the playwright “sentimental.” This seems to enrage Woolf who could not imagine approaching literature in the same blanketing manner—Thoby “was more casual, rough and ready and comprehensive.” Woolf and her father were word-breakers, critical as ever when it came to the literary arts. Thoby, she often described, was the “tolerant” reader.
I’ve been drawn into their seemingly surface-level bond (still a strong bond) and going down a few rabbit holes tonight.
“How reserved we were! Brothers and sisters talk quite freely together about — oh everything… We never talked about ourselves even; I can recall no confidences, no compliments; no kisses; no self analysis between me and him.”
—Virginia Woolf
The most overwhelming analysis I’ve read—aside from Woolf’s simple disdain for Thoby’s arrogance—is the fact that during his education, her older brother just wasn’t around much. And when he was around, she noticed a certain “homosociality” in him and his fellow Cambridge friends. There was a sense that she “subtly undermine[d] the value of a university education,” especially after the men, upon learning ancient Greek culture at school, seemed to have adopted “an ossified view” of the culture, seeing only relics where Woolf saw lived experiences, humanity.
“As Quentin Bell suggests, Woolf’s longing for Thoby after his death was complicated by a sense that he had been a mystery to her when he was alive; she sought to know more about him, partly as a consolation for his death and ‘partly for a more complex reason — an amused yet resentful curiosity about the privileged masculine society of Cambridge.”
— from Jane de Gay’s Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past
Why this is all so fascinating to me: I consider myself a “breaker of words” in the sense that I struggle to create a comprehensive picture of a work of art without cutting whole parts into pieces and magnifying one sentence at a time. And I view this disassembly as some kind of craft work, in a way. It is wholly different from writing as a reporter or journalist, careers that demand comprehension in relaying information to the reader. These are two different worlds, the literary and the journalistic and I’m finding a home somewhere in between, but farther from the latter. Unlike Woolf, I should mention, I’m not sure I believe one form of “comprehension” is superior to the other.
I am also deeply moved by sibling relationships in literature, and curious how closeness builds or frays or fails to exist from the get-go between brother and sister or brother and brother etc. Seeing complicated sibling bonds in my own family, I know for certain I want to write about the space between two humans bound by blood or legal papers and the oscillating waveforms from childhood to adulthood. I found Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House especially lovely for this very reason.
Will be requesting Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves at my local library. The book is considered by some critics to make a significant reference to Thoby Stephen.
—fiza
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