Selecting Woolf's Essays

It is time for a capacious, authoritative one-volume selection of Virginia Woolf's essays and journalism. (Perhaps one is in preparation. I don't know.) The sixth and final volume of her collected essays was released in 2011. It is wondrous, as are all of the volumes in the series, but though it's a goldmine for scholars, the series isn't really aimed at the everyday reader; each volume is relatively expensive (though not to the extent of an academic volume, e.g. the Cambridge Editions), and plenty of the material is ephemeral, repetitive, or esoteric.

A one-volume Selected Essays does exist, edited by David Bradshaw and published by Oxford World's Classics. It's better than nothing, but it's small and missing many of Woolf's best essays — including perhaps her single most-frequently-reprinted essay, "The Death of the Moth". Bradshaw also slights Woolf's literary essays, perhaps because the two Common Reader volumes remain in print. Also in print is Michèle Barnett's Women and Writing, and it's a pretty good selection, but as the title suggests, the focus is specific. (And in any case the selection was made in 1979, and Woolf scholarship has developed a lot since then. The authoritative Essays volumes didn't even start appearing until 1986.)

In 1993, Penguin published a two-volume selection of the essays edited by Rachel Bowlby. For what I assume were reasons of copyright, it was only released in the UK. It's a very good selection of 55 essays total (25 more than Bradshaw), though each volume was a little under 200 pages in length, so it could easily have been a single book.

I've been thinking about what it would be useful to have in a new Selected Essays, one built from the now complete Essays volumes. It deserves to be bigger than any of the selections so far, though not so gigantic that it's unwieldy. After all, it's drawing from thousands of pages of material. I would lean toward a length of 400-500 pages, say 150,000 words or so.

Any imagined table of contents I create must be highly provisional at best, subject to the vagaries of memory and personal taste, but as I think about it, I realize I do have some thought about what would be useful for students and, perhaps most importantly, for ordinary readers to have as a collection of Woolf's essays.

"We must remain readers..."

photo by Black Cat Books

Virginia Woolf, from "How Should One Read a Book":

We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Thinking Back with Our Foremothers: For Jane Marcus

It is far too early to tear down the barricades. Dancing shoes will not do. We still need our heavy boots and mine detectors.
—Jane Marcus, "Storming the Toolshed"

1. Seeking Refuge in Feminist Revolutions in Modernism
Last week, I spent two days at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. I hadn't really been sure that I was going to go. I hemmed and hawed. I'd missed the call for papers, so hadn't even had a chance to possibly get on a panel or into a seminar. Conferences bring out about 742 different social anxieties that make their home in my backbrain. I would only know one or maybe two people there. Should I really spend the money on conference fees for a conference I was highly ambivalent about? I hemmed. I hawed.

In the end, though, I went, mostly because my advisor would be part of a seminar session honoring the late Jane Marcus, who had been her advisor. (I think of Marcus now as my grandadvisor, for multiple reasons, as will become clear soon.) The session was titled "Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Feminist Revolutions in Modernism", the title being an homage to Marcus's essay "Thinking Back Through Our Mothers" from the 1981 anthology New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, itself an homage to the phrase in Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Various former students and colleagues of Marcus would circulate papers among themselves, then discuss them together at the seminar. Because of the mechanics of seminars, participants need to sign up fairly early, and I'd only registered for the conference itself a few days before it began, so there wasn't even any guarantee I'd been able to observe; outside participation is at the discretion of the seminar leader. Thankfully, the seminar leader allowed three of us to join as observers. (I'm trying not to use any names here, simply because of the nature of a seminar. I haven't asked anybody if I can talk about them, and seminars are not public, though the participants are listed in the conference program.)

Marcus was a socialist feminist who was very concerned with bringing people to the table, whether metaphorical or literal, and so of course nobody in the seminar would put up with the auditors being out on the margins, and they insisted that we sit at the table and introduce ourselves. Without knowing it, I sat next to a senior scholar in the field whose work has been central to my own. I'd never seen a picture of her, and to my eyes she looked young enough to be a grad student (the older I get, the younger everybody else gets!). When she introduced herself, I became little more than a fanboy for a moment, and it took all the self-control I could muster not to blurt out some ridiculousness like, "I just love you!" Thankfully, the seminar got started and then there was too much to think about for my inner fanboy to unleash himself. (I did tell her afterwards how useful her work has been to me, because that just seemed polite. Even senior scholars spend a lot of hours working in solitude and obscurity, wondering if their often esoteric efforts will ever be of any use to anybody. I wanted her to know that hers had.) It soon became the single best event I've ever attended at an academic conference.

Anecdotes on Literary Popularity and Difficulty

When interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal regarding Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer was asked: "Can Ligotti’s work find a broader audience, such as with people who tend to read more pop horror such as Stephen King?" His response was, it seems to me, accurate:

Ligotti tells a damn fine tale and a creepy one at that. You can find traditional chills to enjoy in his work or you can find more esoteric delights. I think his mastery of a sense of unease in the modern world, a sense of things not being quite what they’re portrayed to be, isn’t just relevant to our times but also very relatable. But he’s one of those writers who finds a broader audience because he changes your brain when you read him—like Roberto Bolano. I’d put him in that camp too—the Bolano of 2666. That’s a rare feat these days.

This reminded me of a few moments from past conversations I've had about the difficulty of modernist texts and their ability to find audiences. I have often fallen into the assumption that difficulty precludes any sort of popularity, and that popularity signals shallowness of writing, even though I know numerous examples that disprove this assumption.

When I was an undergraduate at NYU, I took a truly life-changing seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway with the late Ilse Dusoir Lind, a great Faulknerian. Faulkner was a revelation for me, total love at first sight, and I plunged in with gusto. Dr. Lind thought I was amusing, and we talked a lot and corresponded a bit later, and she wrote me a recommendation letter when I was applying to full-time jobs for the first time. (I really need to write something about her. She was a marvel.) Anyway, we got to talking once about the difficulty of Faulkner's best work, and she said that she had recently (this would be 1995 or so) had a conversation with somebody high up at Random House who said that Faulkner was their most consistent seller, and their bestselling writer across the years. I don't know if this is true or not, or if I remember the details accurately, or if Dr. Lind heard the details accurately, but I can believe it, especially given how common Faulkner's work is in schools.

And this was ten years before the Oprah Book Club's "Summer of Faulkner". I love something Meghan O'Rourke wrote in her chronicle of trying to read Faulkner with Oprah:

Going online in search of help, I worried about what I might find. What if no one liked Faulkner, or—worse—the message boards were full of politically correct protests of his attitude toward women, or rife with therapeutic platitudes inspired by the incest and suicide that underpin the book? But on the boards, which I found after clicking past a headline about transvestites who break up families, I discovered scores of thoughtful posts that were bracingly enthusiastic about Faulkner. Even the grumpy readers—and there were some, of course—seemed to want to discover what everyone else was excited about. What I liked best was that people were busy addressing something no one talks about much these days: the actual experience of reading, the nuts and bolts of it.

We often underestimate the common reader.

A Woolfian Summer

The new school year has started, which means I've officially ended the work I did for a summer research fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Graduate School, although there are still a few loose ends I hope to finish in the coming days and weeks. I've alluded to that work previously, but since it's mostly finished, I thought it might be useful to chronicle some of it here, in case it is of interest to anyone else. (Parts of this are based on my official report, which is why it's a little formal.)

I spent the summer studying the literary context of Virginia Woolf’s writings in the 1930s. The major result of this was that I developed a spreadsheet to chronicle her reading from 1930-1938 (the period during which she conceived and wrote her novel The Years and her book-length essay Three Guineas), a tool which from the beginning I intended to share with other scholars and readers, and so created with Google Sheets so that it can easily be viewed, updated, downloaded, etc. It's not quite done: I haven't finished adding information from Woolf's letters from 1936-1938, and there's one big chunk of reading notebook information (mostly background material for Three Guineas) that still needs to be added, but there's a plenty there.

Originally, I expected (and hoped) that I would spend a lot of time working with periodical sources, but within a few weeks this proved both impractical and unnecessary to my overall goals. The major literary review in England during this period was the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but working with the TLS historical database proved difficult because there is no way to access whole issues easily, since every article is a separate PDF. If you know what you’re looking for, or can search by title or author, you can find what you need; but if you want to browse through issues, the database is cumbersome and unwieldy. Further, I had not realized the scale of material — the TLS was published weekly, and most reviews were 800-1,000 words, so they were able to publish about 2,000 reviews each year. Just collecting the titles, authors, and reviewers of every review would create a document the length of a hefty novel. The other periodical of particular interest is the New Statesman & Nation (earlier titled New Statesman & Athenaeum), which Leonard Woolf had been an editor of, and to which he contributed many reviews and essays. Dartmouth College has a complete set of the New Statesman in all its forms, but copies are in storage, must be requested days in advance, and cannot leave the library.

All of this work could be done, of course, but I determined that it would not be a good use of my time, because much more could be discovered through Woolf’s diaries, letters, and reading notebooks, supplemented by the diaries, letters, and biographies of other writers. (As well  as  Luedeking and Edmonds’ bibliography of Leonard Woolf, which includes summaries of all of his NS&N writings — perfectly adequate for my work.)

And so I began work on the spreadsheet. Though I chronicled all of Woolf’s references to her reading from 1930-1938, my own interest was primarily in what contemporary writers she was reading, and how that reading may have affected her conception and structure of The Years and, to a lesser extent, Three Guineas (to a lesser extent because her references in that book itself are more explicit, her purpose clearer). As I began the work, I feared I was on another fruitless path. During the first years of the 1930s, Woolf was reading primarily so as to write the literary essays in The Common Reader, 2nd Series, which contains little about contemporary writing, and from the essays themselves we know what she was reading.

But then in 1933 I struck gold with this entry from 2 September 1933:

The Perils of Biopics: Life in Squares and Testament of Youth

The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares, about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas.

I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much; Testament of Youth is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance. 

The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're almost always destined to fail. (Of course, "what we want" is a rhetorical flourish, a bit of fiction that would more accurately be expressed as "what I think, on reflection, that I want, at least now, and what I imagine, which is to say guess, what somebody other than myself might want". For the sake of brevity, I shall continue occasionally to use the phrase "what we want".)

What's in a Book

I recently bought a miscellaneous set of Virginia Woolf books, a collection that seems to have been put together by a scholar or (in Woolfian parlance) a common reader during the 1960s and 1970s. The set included some volumes useful for my research purposes, as well as all four of the old Collected Essays that I have long coveted because though they have been superceded by the six-volume Essays of Virginia Woolf, they are far more elegantly designed and produced (alas, copies in nice condition rarely seem to go up for sale at a price a normal person can afford, even on a splurge). At about $6 per book, it seemed like a deal I'd likely never see again.

One of the joys of giving books a new home is that they sometimes share glimpses of their history. This is for me the primary impetus to own an old book. They become tools for imagination, not only through the words on their pages, but through their physical presence. I have lived with books my whole life, and have come to imagine their writing, production, sale — what was it like to pick up this well-worn volume when it was bright and new, its binding still tight, its pages crisp? What led to this page being dog-eared, what caused this tear along the dust-jacket's edge? Who was the child who drew in crayon on the first pages? Most importantly: What did it feel like to read these words when they were first in this form?

For The Years

Hogarth Press first edition, cover by Vanessa Bell

Published in 1937, The Years was the last of her novels that Virginia Woolf lived to see released. Coming more than five years after the release of the poetic and, to many people, opaquely experimental The Waves, The Years seemed like the work of a totally different writer — it looked like a family novel, something along the lines of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, the sort of book a younger Woolf had scorned.  

The Years became a bestseller in both the UK and the US, and garnered some good reviews — in the New York Times, Peter Monro Jack declared it "Virginia Woolf's Richest Novel". Its fame quickly faded, however. After Woolf's death, her husband Leonard claimed he didn't think it was among her best work, though he'd been afraid, he said, to tell her that, given how long she had worked on it and how hard that work had been for her. As Woolf's reputation increased in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly among feminist academics, The Years tended to get shuffled aside in favor of the other novels and essays. Despite some advocacy from scholars and an extraordinary edition as part of the Cambridge Woolf, The Years remains relatively neglected. This is unfortunate, as it is a magnificent book.

Notes on a Sentence from "The Death of the Moth"

Forced by some reductive power to declare a single favorite essay, mine would be "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf. It is a marvel of concision, and yet it contains the universe. It is an essay both personal and cosmic, material and spiritual.

Whenever I teach writing, I use "The Death of the Moth" as an example of the interplay of form and content. (While I have seldom met a pairing I didn't want to deconstruct, the form/content binary is one I continue to find useful. Yes, the separation is problematic — what, in language, is content without form or form without content? — but I also find it a valuable way to talk about concepts that are otherwise invisible or easily muddled.) Usually, I take one sentence, scrawl it out on the board, and pick it apart. It's not always the same sentence, but recently I've been using this one:

Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him.

The first thing to do is break the sentence apart. Here's one way:

Happy Birthday to Virginia Woolf

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it — it went on increasing in his experience.

--Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway

Today is Virginia Woolf's 129th birthday. Woolf is one of my touchstone writers, a writer I've been reading for the majority of my life (really, I first tried to read Mrs. Dalloway in middle school -- I didn't get too far, but I found the first pages of the book utterly entrancing, and by the time I read it fully for the first time eight or nine years later, I had those pages nearly memorized). I've read all of Woolf's novels at least once, and Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando many times. They are magic poetry.

I've known a couple of Woolf scholars over the years, and one of the things that made me a lifelong Woolf devotee was working at the 7th International Virginia Woolf Society Conference when it was held in my hometown of Plymouth, NH. I had only read Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando at that point, but I found the conference invigorating. I even coerced Hermione Lee into signing my copy of her brilliant biography while I signed her in. The next fall, I took an undergraduate course devoted to Woolf's work; I was the only male in the class, and some of the other students thought my passion for Woolf's writings was a little weird. "You don't understand!" I remember telling one of them when we happened to find ourselves sitting together on a bus. "There's nobody like her! Those sentences!" It was hardly one of my more eloquent moments, and probably led to me being considered weirder than I already was, but nonetheless the passion was real. (I had a similar, though I hope slightly more informative, moment this past term when I spent 10 minutes taking a class of writing students through one of the sentences in "The Death of the Moth." I wrote the sentence on the board, broke it into some components, talked with great enthusiasm about it and the genius of it ... and after class went to my department head and said, "Do you ever get really into something you're doing in class, then look at the students and think, 'Wow, I really am a freak.'" And she replied, "Yes, it's the foundation of my pedagogy.")

I knew Anne Fernald as a blogger before I knew she was a Woolf scholar, though she had been at the Plymouth conference. We used to hang out together at the LitBlog Co-op, and when I first moved to New Jersey, she gave me a tour of Jersey City and environs. Anne is editing an edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press, work that has consumed her for a few years, and though I don't envy her the tedium of some of that work, I do envy her getting to study all sorts of editions of the novel, to see it in all its permutations, to trace its meanings and influences. If I can find a line where they're selling her edition when it is released, I will force my way to the front.

Anyway, what I wanted to say here was that a talk Anne gave at The New York Public Library about her work on Mrs. Dalloway is now available as a podcast. It's fascinating stuff (well, to those of us who love Mrs. Dalloway) and a fine way to spend an hour during Woolf's birthday.

Falling Into Oblivion without a Parachute

It ain't healthy to get too metacommentarial, but sometimes the zeitgeist blows such urges your way, and you neglect to duck. Or I do, at least. Thus, I have managed to get into some good conversations with a few different friends recently about our particular preferences when it comes to how we write and read book reviews, criticism, blog posts, etc. (out of laziness and a general aversion to taxonomy, I'm going to use the word "review" here to mean almost any commentary on books and other stuffs). Some of the conversations were sparked by thoughtful posts by Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen (e.g. here and here and here), some were sparked by reviews that annoyed one or both of us who were interlocuting (I know you and your friends just talk, but if you had the sorts of friends I have, you, too, would interlocute), and some were sparked by just saying to each other, "So what do you do when..." The ideas have caused me to keep thinking all week, and so I thought I would put some down here and see where they lead.

1. THE ARROGANCE OF WRITING ANYTHING FOR AN AUDIENCE
Larry's brave for having tackled the question of what a quality book review looks like, and I think it's a good exercise for anybody who writes about books to try now and then, but at this point it's not something that really interests me, because I've learned that my own ideas on the subject are mostly prejudices and are as full of exceptions as rules. I could, I suppose, lay out all the things I try to do when writing about books, movies, and tchotchkes, but I'd rather let the writing speak for itself. And anyway, who am I to offer pronouncements?

It takes a tremendous arrogance to write anything, and yet in most of the writers I know the necessary arrogance is tempered by a deep insecurity. For me, the insecurity wins as often as the arrogance does, and so there are as many days when I feel utterly mortified that I have ever put a sentence of my own in front of the world as there are days when I want somebody out there to pay attention to my sentences. Such feelings only grow more complex when it comes to reviewing -- what, after all, is more arrogant than spouting off in public about a book somebody has spent tremendous amounts of time and energy writing? (What's more arrogant? Asking somebody to spend hours of their life reading your book...)

There's tons of advice out there for neophyte writers, but the best advice I ever got when I was younger and more idealistic came from Calder Willingham, whose wife was head of the English department at my high school. Willingham was one of the few professional writers I encountered as a kid (the others were Jim Kelly and Lee Modesitt), and he got frustrated by my idealism. We mostly wrote letters back and forth to each other, disagreeing about movies and books quite vehemently, and some of his sentences burned their way into my brain, particularly these: "You say you have to write. Why? Who is holding a gun to your head?" Everybody else in my life had always praised the activity of writing as a wonderful and ennobling one, but Willingham knew better, knew that it could be nothing more than an extension of the ugliest egotism (he'd suffered insults from some of the most prominent writers of his generation, including Norman Mailer, who called him "a clown with the bite of a ferret ... [who] suffers from the misapprehension that he is a master mind"), and he knew that even when writing doesn't bring out the worst in people that it can consume an otherwise worthwhile life in an activity that, more often than not, leads to perpetual disappointment and the likelihood of almost all the effort disappearing into an abyss of silence.

(Here's my advice to neophyte writers: Memorize Hugo von Hoffmannstahl's "Lord Chandos Letter". And, for that matter, Chekhov's "The Bet".)

And yet we all keep writing stuff. I'm grateful for it all, too, and not the least for reviews and commentaries -- I love reading thoughtful writings about books, and often enjoy such things more than I enjoy reading the books being written about. To put it clinically, it fascinates me to see how people interact with texts. The nature and history of publishing interest me for similar reasons.


2. THE FIRST PERSON
People seem to have strong opinions about the place of first-person pronouns and personal anecdotes in reviews and criticism. This is an argument happening not just among editors and writers, but among teachers and students -- my high school students invariably have been told by their teachers before me that they must at all costs avoid first-person pronouns in their papers. I tell them not to worry about it, and instead to consider what is relevant or irrelevant for their purpose and audience. Remember Thoreau:

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

If I were teaching a class on reviewing, I'd share a review by Borges in which the great master writes more about himself than the book under review. Why can Borges get away with this? The easy answer is: Because he was a genius. The slightly less easy answer is: Because what he has to say is more interesting and illuminating than anything else he might say in the review, and it still tells us, in a sly way, about the book. Achieve that once in your career as a writer and you should be able to die happy.

Part of the reason so much first-person reviewing is annoying is because it doesn't establish that the writer's point of view is an interesting one, and so it just comes off as narcissistic. The narcissism of great writers is mitigated by their art; the narcissism of banal writers overwhelms any virtues.

It's all about what works. Writing is an attempt to communicate, sure, but it should also be an attempt to communicate in an interesting way. Functional writing might get the job done, but we seldom want to end there. An interesting point of view can be as powerful as an interesting style. Both can also be a distraction, particularly when the writer seemingly has little to say.

Judging whether a writer actually has something to say can be more difficult than it may appear. Academic writing in the humanities often gets criticized for saying very little in as obfuscatory a way possible. Much deserves the criticism, but I still grow suspicious whenever someone starts complaining about academics and jargon, partly because it's an old argument (see also some of the posts in The Valve's symposium on Theory's Empire), partly because it smacks of anti-intellectualism ("I can't understand this, therefore it must be BAD!"), and partly because it seems like a distraction from the real problem, which tends to be a a matter of purpose and audience. If your intention is to write for a general audience, then it's self-defeating to use a specialized vocabulary, and specialized vocabularies in the wrong context are as likely to seem smug and shallow as they are to convey any meaning. Exceptions require real skill -- I think Samuel Delany's nonfiction collections are successful more often than not at using a mix of specialized vocabularies for a general audience because essays and interviews collected in his books tend to be from a wide variety of publications, and the mix of original audiences for pieces that usually have some overlapping subject matter helps the reader make a transition from the more accessible pieces to the more difficult.

An "objective" tone is no more inherently good or bad than a "personal" tone. The more I read, the less patience I have for objective tones -- indeed, the more suspicious I am of them. Too often, the pose of objectivity is a disguise for shallow thought, because it's a rare statement that can be universally true. I may be an inveterate postmodernist, but you probably don't need to be as plagued by doubts as I am to realize that the truth of almost any statement we make is subjective and contingent -- it is a claim to truth at a particular time and from a particular perception.

The most annoying sort of "objective" writing (and it is hardly objective at all) is, for me, the sort that wants to claim great authority for sweeping statements. Oracular pronouncements belong in epic poetry; elsewhere they're usually pompous. Some people have built up their reputations by intoning their words as if those words contain some special glimpse of the Truth, but this is a performance of personality, not a way to advance an argument or contribute knowledge to the world. The writings of my own that I find most insufferable now are the ones in which I took what I've come to think of as the Old Man of Olympus position, a tone of certainty and universal truth. It's disingenous. It's why most manuals on "how to write" are drivel. It's why statements such as "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" are useless. It's why I find people like Harlan Ellison occasionally entertaining, but more often obnoxious and certainly less worthwhile than more quiet, thoughtful, less certain, less combative personalities. Certainty is the province of fools. (He says with certainty.)


3. INTENTIONS AND AUTHORS
I keep seeing people say that a good book review judges how well a writer has achieved her or his intentions with the book. That seems to me to be more what a writing workshop should do -- there, you can ask the writer, "So what did you intend?" (Not that the writer always knows.) I'd rather read and write reviews that show what the book made the reviewer think about, because that's knowledge the reviewer can claim, whereas an author's intentions are generally both obvious and hidden -- obvious in the broadest sense ("I wanted to write a historical romance") and hidden in most other senses ("I hoped that by creating patterns of beautiful words I could resolve some of my feelings about poodles") -- and obvious things don't lead to interesting reviews, while hidden things are inaccessible. If the writer wanted to create an effect in the reader's mind -- and that's what writing does, after all -- then the reviewer will speak to that by presenting what it is the writing did in her or his mind, which is all a reviewer can truly speak to. I sometimes fall back on the fiction of saying a particular piece of writing does x, y, or z to "the reader", but I hope when I do so the fiction is obvious -- "the reader" is always and inescapably me.

I'm all for the death of The Author. (One of my favorite authors is Barthes, I must admit. Another is Foucault.) "The Intentional Fallacy" is an old idea, and one not without its critics. Reginald Shepherd says things much better than I could here, and the conversation in the comments shows how complex the subject can become. (And yes, for the moment I'm pretending most of those complexities don't exist. We have reached the section of the post in which my doubts threaten to consume me like a cute, furry creature in the mouth of a carnivore.)

For all practical purposes, for most readers a writer's name is simply a handy organizing principle, a way to group some texts together. A reviewer's name, then, is a sign attached to a document about a document that has another sign attached to it as a byline. Booby traps of delusion and deception await when we pretend otherwise. The age of the internet has resurrected The Author to some extent, because now we can read their blogs and make comments and sometimes, if we're brave, even email them, creating levels of intertextuality previously impossible (unimaginable!) ... but texts remain texts, not people.


3a. THE FIRST TRY
Here's what I said in an email to a friend, and I don't think I've much improved on it above: "The problem with most fiction, actually, is that the writer's intentions are all too clear (so, alas, they are mostly discernable), which is just no fun at all. I want more Brechts who intend to foment revolution and instead end up creating rich and nuanced characters and situations. The writer's intentions matter during the editing process, but once the book is out there, the book is what matters -- that's part of what you're arguing, but you're going about it in a way that is not logically sustainable, because it seems to assume either that we have knowledge of the author's mind while creating the text or that the writer matters more than the reader. A great review is not great because it shows us what the writer intended, but because it gives us a particularly compelling chronicle of the reader's experience of the text. That is why discussions of the writer and not what is written are irrelevant and annoying."

4. LOST ART
Ideally, we write everything with an equal determination to commit art. Practically, this seldom happens. It's more common for writers to dash off reviews and spend years writing one short story rather than vice versa. Perhaps that's how it should be. There is something suspiciously parasitic about reviews -- the image of the critic who is incapable of creating anything himself, but who nonetheless writes about what others have created. And yet isn't all writing parasitic, sucking blood and sustenance from traditions of language and culture? Borges imagined reviews of imaginary books, and Lem wrote books of them. More broadly, fictional nonfiction has many traditions -- I found the following passage from Carmen Boullosa's review of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas exciting:

As Bolaño acknowledged in an interview with Eliseo Álvarez, published posthumously in 2005, Nazi Literature in the Americas "owes a lot to The Temple of Iconoclasts by Rodolfo Wilcock...and The Temple of Iconoclasts owes a lot to A Universal History of Infamy by Borges, which makes sense, since Wilcock was a friend and admirer of Borges. But Borges's book, A Universal History of Infamy, owes much to [a book by] one of Borges's great teachers, Alfonso Reyes, Retratos reales e imaginarios (Real and Imagined Portraits), which is a gem. And Reyes's book owes a lot to Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, which is where this all began. These are the aunts and uncles, parents and godparents of my book." I would add one more relative: Novelas antes del tiempo (Novels Before Time), a volume by the delightful Spanish writer Rosa Chacel, which consists of notes for novels, all charmingly related, that the author thought about writing but never did.

If only our book reviewers were more creative, more playful and artful! Do any of us have the courage to be so? The risk of failure becomes so much greater -- the risk of looking like an idiot in public, which is the great risk in writing anything, but we minimize the risk by writing in safe, hand-me-down modes. To aspire to art means to open yourself to a far greater possibility of failure -- indeed, perhaps the failure is inevitable and unavoidable, and that's why everybody quotes Beckett. Perhaps more accurate than the "Fail better" quotation would be this:

Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That's where I'd go, if I could go, that's who I'd be, if I could be.

5. CODA
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry, 18 November 1924:

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that.

Anton Chekhov, from a letter to Alexey Suvorin, 30 May 1888 (translated by Rosamund Bartlett):

It's time for writers, especially writers of real artistic worth, to realize, just as Socrates in his time and Voltaire in his, that in fact nothing can be understood in this world. The crowd thinks it knows and understands everything; and the stupider it is, the broader the compass of its perceived horizons. But if writers whom the public trusts could only bring themselves to admit that they understand nothing of what they see, that would be a great advance in the realm of thought, a great step forward.

Dambudzo Marechera, from "The Black Insider":

"Since reading is an industry in its own right somebody somewhere is getting the profits. Publishers, critics, lecturers, second-hand booksellers and shoplifters. It's a complete study of how parasites and their hosts exist. At the same time there are all the rest of them breathing down the writer's neck telling him he must write in a certain way and not in another way; and there are those who think that because they have read what has been written have got a perfect right to say just about anything to the writer and he is supposed to take it calmly. Every man is a walking collection of aphorisms. The thing about a story lurking round every corner, and a novel resting uneasily inside every human skull. Nonsense. Apart from the initial spark of creativity in the best and worst parts of the first book, the writer's road is littered with crumpled contracts, bleeding symbols, and broken teeth, all in the wake of big business. The hidden persuaders are well dug in behind the ramparts and they know exactly how to stimulate that kind of phoneyness which a complacent reading public takes for its own good taste. At the same time you get the heels crunching down on your spine to make you think that objectivity is possible where such things as language rule. Roland Barthes has tried to blow up that balloon and quite successfully too, though they have, of course, an in-built eject-mechanism and he will probably find himself falling into oblivion without a parachute."

Liz, who was staring out the window, said noncommittally:

"Those paratroops are still coming down. Something big is going on over there."

Wo(o)lf(e)s in the World

Virginia Woolf and Gene Wolfe are topics of a few conversation out on the internets these days:

• Some of Virginia Woolf's first editions are a bargain on the collector's market.
  
• Woolf and other artists are being used to promote arts education.
  
• Woolf [and others] and neuroscience. Or not. (The author of the book in question responds here.)
  
• "Virginia Woolf and Boring Habits"
  
• Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen is reading a lot of Gene Wolfe and writing up his responses.
  
• Waggish reads The Book of the New Sun.
  
• Spurious offers further thoughts on Book of the New Sun.
  
• Richard Crary's thoughts on Mr. Waggish's thoughts.
  
• Hoof and Hide is a Gene Wolfe blog. Which is not to say a blog by Gene Wolfe. Which is an interesting thought. In fact, I'd like to see Gene Wolfe and Virginia Woolf collaborate on a blog. Yet another of my impossible desires...