Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

We argued about it. He calls it a work of genius; he thinks it unlike any other novel; he says that the people are ghosts; he says it is very strange: I have no philosophy of life he says; my people are puppets, moved hither & thither by fate. He doesn’t agree that fate works in this way. … he found it very interesting, & beautiful, … & quite intelligible. … Neither of us knows what the public will think. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice. (D 2:186, 26 July 1922)

Reaching rough waters while composing The Voyage Out, Woolf had worried that her young woman “will not speak, and my ship is like to sink” (L 1:341, 4 August 1908). If The Voyage Out swims or sinks on conversation, in Jacob’s Room Woolf’s “own voice”—ventriloquized through a newly invented essayist-narrator—carries a radically free fictional form that subordinates plot and character to the social forces that drive modern life and modern war. Seeing but unseen, this essayist-narrator frames a kaleidoscopic array of private and public scenes with a city-dweller’s anonymity and freedom. The novel’s vitality lies less in what its characters say than in the essayist-narrator’s angle of vision, as when “she” (for reasons discussed below) notes that Clara Durrant with her “young woman’s language” is “not one to encroach upon Wednesday” in her shilling diary (JR 71). As for Jacob Flanders, he is at once an elusive being no net of words can capture and—delivered by his education to a modern war that overwhelms individual will—a puppet moved hither and thither by fate, one of the war dead, a ghost. As Rachel Vinrace dies in a battle to bring to light civilization’s hidden “truth,” Jacob dies in the gap between a founding ideal of European civilization—summed up as the “Greek myth” or “illusion”—and modern barbarity (JR 137, 138). Through the deaths of their young protagonists, these companion pieces of the modernist bildungsroman suggest that to learn to read the modern novel is to become aware of the hidden forces that drive modern lives; that to witness the life and death of the puppet or ghost its pages pursue may be in some sense to save one’s own.

In an England just embarked on a senseless war that would inflict a staggering number of casualties on the European nations over four years, two characters pause by a statue that links the violent conflicts of ancient Troy and contemporary Europe.¹ Beside the ancient war hero, the modern characters appear unheroic, bathetic, “foolish.” As the riderless horse charges by, the “utterly unconscious” Clara turns in hysterical tears from the statue’s inscription—“erected by the women of England”—to the kindly, ineffectual Mr. Bowley, who is the furthest thing from an Achilles and can do nothing to save her from that “unseizable force” or horse that is galloping toward war (JR 156).

But this little prose stanza (or room) opens onto other vistas that elucidate Clara’s unconscious habitation of modernity. In the course of her random-walk investigations of the social system that drives Jacob toward his fate, the essayist-narrator observes the shaping influence of the classical heritage or “Greek myth” inculcated in public-school English boys from childhood (JR 137). “We have been brought up in an illusion,” she remarks, fostered not only by the masculine education system and professions but by hero-worshipping “women of England”: the statue’s nameless sponsors; governesses who compare little boys like Jacob to Greek statues; mothers like Betty Flanders who hand them over to surrogate fathers to be taught Greek and Latin; prostitutes and lovers such as Florinda, who tells Jacob, “You’re like one of those statues … in the British Museum,” and Fanny Elmer, who consoles herself while Jacob is away in (yes) Greece with daily visits to the “battered Ulysses” of the Elgin marbles; and strangers like Madame Lucien Gravé who, catching sight of him on the Acropolis, parodies the covert aggression of the European female passion for noble, “eyeless” war heroes by pointing her camera (the social machine writ small, an instrument of this female gaze) at Jacob’s head (JR 138, 80, 170).

If Clara suffers unconsciously from the Greek “illusion,” the essayist-narrator of Jacob’s Room gauges the cost of this hero worship, as do other modernist writers in the aftermath of the First World War. In a small, bitter elegy in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), for example, Ezra Pound’s litany of the illusions and “lies” that sacrificed a generation of young men memorializes in a few spare, carved lines his dead friend, the young sculptor of genius Henri Gaudier-Brzeska:

These fought in any case,

and some believing,

pro domo, in any case …

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,

non “dulce” non “et decor” …

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,

home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy

usury age-old and age-thick

and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before

Young blood and high blood,

fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before

disillusions as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,

laughter out of dead bellies.

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them.

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,

For a few thousand battered books.²

As in Pound’s negation of Horace’s dulce et decor, Woolf and many other war elegists ironically invoke the classical tradition that endows English public life to strip war of the glory these myths bestow. Unlike the Homeric bards who over many generations wrought the events of the Trojan war into a tragedy willed by the gods—so that, in Helen’s words, “we might live in song for men to come”—the modernists do not invoke divine powers in hope of redeeming “wastage as never before.” Where Homer paints warring gods and humans suffering war as fate divinely ordained, the modernists see “liars in public places,” “disillusions as never told in the old days.” Whereas the Homeric poems transform a ten-year war into the making of a people and a cultural identity that reaches from ancient Greece to modern London, Pound condemns a “botched” civilization—the “broken statues” and “battered books” that lured young blood, fine bodies, quick eyes to destruction.

“Only when a nation becomes a fiction does it go to war,” Elaine Scarry proposes—a fiction of difference, boundaries, collective identity that underwrites the scapegoating of the other as the enemy. The First World War inspired the modernists not to heroic mythmaking but to a critical unmaking.³ Pound’s refrain as never before marks this break with “the old days,” with “disillusions … never told.” Whereas the Iliad endows human slaughter with tragic grandeur even as it captures war’s sorrow, the modernists sought to expose the fictions or “lies” of nation and civilization imprinted upon the collective unconscious that bore millions of Jacobs, Jimmys, and Septimus Warren Smiths to their deaths. Allowing that “No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off without our astonishing gift for illusion,” the essayist-narrator yet subjects the Greeks’ seductive realism to skeptical regard. Because they “could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it,” she observes, one first reads “Xenophon; then Euripides. One day—that was an occasion, by God—what people have said appears to have sense in it; ‘the Greek spirit’; the Greek this, that, and the other; … The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion. … it all seemed to [Jacob] very distasteful” (JR 137–38). The Greeks who paint fruit that attracts real birds paint the heroic fictions of Ulysses (that “liar in public places” par excellence) that his society projects onto Jacob—body (“statuesque, noble, and eyeless,” the type of “manly beauty”) and soul (“the flavour” and “love of Greek”—just enough to “stumble through a play”) (JR 170, 137, 76). As birds peck at paint and canvas, nations make war over illusions. In postwar England Homeric illusion becomes disillusion; story, questioning; divinely sanctioned lies, the private and public deceits that strangle the young lives of Jacob, Jimmy, Florinda, Clara; epic tragedy, the struggle for an international civilization in which non dulce non et decor pro patria mori.

Literary historians of the First World War emphasize the abyss between the soldiers’ agonizing experiences at the battlefront and the sunny heroic rhetoric that prevailed at home—sometimes felt to be “the enemy at the rear.”⁴ Modernist literature and art had to get rid of such stories as Kipling’s “fathers” tell—“lies,” “illusions,” “common forms” oblivious to war’s horrors—unless, as Walter Benjamin thought, modern war did it for them.⁵ In the war’s aftermath, wrote Benjamin, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”:

One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. … [O]ur picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. … Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. … For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field … of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.⁶

Benjamin attributes the story’s demise to the impossibility of any moral commensurate with the experience of modern war: “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences” in a “moral world” (83–84). In an era in which manmade technological, economic, and political orders—far from extending the powers of body and mind as a tool or weapon extends the hand’s ability to make or destroy—turn the human creature into an alienated instrument of remote interests and purposes, war stories disintegrate into briefs from hell, notes on incomprehensible slaughter and suffering. Thus Gaudier-Brzeska described trench warfare as “a sight worthy of Dante, there was at the bottom a foot deep of liquid mud in which we had to stand two days and two nights, rest we had in small holes nearly as muddy, add to this a position making a V point into the enemy who shell us from three sides, the close vicinity of 800 putrefying German corpses, and you are at the front in the marshes of Aisne.”⁷ But in this modern inferno, vacated by Dante’s divinities hardly less than Homer’s, there was no guide, no way out, and no moral reason for being there in the first place.

Two years after the armistice and the year she began Jacob’s Room, Woolf reflected on the psychic wound that the war and its historical conditions had inflicted upon her generation, laying down beneath individual circumstance and personal happiness an ineradicable awareness of the precariousness and pain of human existence:

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down. I feel giddy. I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this? … its life itself, I think sometimes, for us in our generation so tragic—no newspaper placard without its shriek of agony from some one. … And with it all how happy I am—if it weren’t for my feeling that its a strip of pavement over an abyss. (D 2:72–73, 25 October 1920)

Benjamin locates the novel’s “significance” in the fact that it offers up to readers a “stranger’s fate,” which “by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader … is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”⁸ But, as readers began complaining from the moment it appeared, Jacob’s Room does not offer Jacob’s story—his fate or death—as a flame at which to warm ourselves. Many early reviewers faulted its lack of a story; some denied it was a novel at all. One judged it mere “notebook entries” out of which “no true novel can be built”; another (Rebecca West) thought the lack of a plot in so accomplished a work proved Woolf “at once a negligible novelist and a supremely important writer”; another, disappointed that it had “no particular story to tell,” confessed that the “old craving for a plot still remains in our unregenerate breasts”; another found “no more than the material for a novel,” which the author “has done hardly anything to put … together”—“no narrative, no design, above all, no perspective”; another concurred that “little flurries of prose poetry do not make art of this rag-bag of impressions.”⁹ The novel’s early readers, in short, mistook the dismantling of the story for neglect “to put it together,” its strategic abandonment of storytelling for narrative failure, its paratactic analytic method for an impressionist “rag-bag.”¹⁰ In throwing out storytelling along with “character-mongering”—a move facilitated by the fact that Jacob’s story in some way touched virtually every European’s in 1922—Woolf not only re-forms narrative perspective and authority but in doing so challenges our “unregenerate” hunger for stories, calling us to modernism’s critique of deadly “illusions” and its creative drive toward new civilizations (JR 154).

In deconstructing Jacob’s story—not offering his fate as a flame at which to warm one’s shivering life but beckoning us out onto the narrow pavement over an abyss that is modern life—Jacob’s Room unwrites the novel (to paraphrase Woolf’s 1920 story “An Unwritten Novel”) to pose the question of how to live, what to do, when “illusions” fail. Earlier we noted the conjoined ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Woolf’s resolve to “re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive” (L 1:356, 19 August 1908). This first work in her “own voice” re-forms the novel not by sacrificing historical consciousness to formal concerns—as critics from Lukács to Jameson mistakenly claim high modernism does—but by inventing a form to bring to the light of day the illusions a “botched” civilization imprints on the collective unconscious.¹¹

“Woolf does not tell Jacob’s story but unwrites it to expose the social forces that initiate him into masculinity and leave him dead on the battlefield. What facilitates this deconstructed bildungsroman is the fact that the war story evoked by Jacob Flanders’ very name did not have to be told in 1922, for (as Lucrezia Warren Smith says) “Every one has friends who were killed in the War” (MD 66). Leaving “character-mongering” to the “gossips,” the essayist-narrator frames Jacob’s life and death not as a unique and personal story but as that of a generation. He is far more like than unlike those anonymous “dozen young men in the prime of life” who “descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together” (JR 154–55). As several critics note, Jacob’s portrait anticipates Woolf’s musings on the autobiography of her first cousin Herbert Fisher, who served in Lloyd George’s cabinet during World War I:

What would have been his shape had he not been stamped and moulded by that great patriarchal machine? Every one of our male relations was shot into that machine at the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod through the pampas.¹²

As the social molding of Rachel Vinrace’s female body and mind moves her toward a destiny that she at once evades and fulfills, Jacob’s Room traces an inexorable yet reasonless reduction of masculine subjects to dead bodies as first Jimmy, then Jacob “feeds crows in Flanders” (JR 97). Judith Lewis Herman compares rape and combat as “complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence … of adult society” and as “paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men respectively.”¹³ Like Rachel’s voyage to Santa Marina, Jacob’s voyage to Greece—“the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization,” which he hopes to repeat “every year so long as I live”—offers only a fantasy of escape from a civilization that delivers him not to adulthood but to death (JR 146). As in The Voyage Out, initiated subjects and initiatory agents are diffused through the novel’s social world. The essayist-narrator’s striking refrain—“It was none of her fault”; “It was none of their fault”; “It seems that men and women are equally at fault”—punctuates a quest for causes that leads beyond individual responsibility or conscience (JR 30, 34, 35, cf. 71, 72, 82, 92). Something is wrong, someone must be accountable, yet no one is; social forces move people to think and act unconsciously, without knowledge or will.

Septimus is not mad to suppose that it “must be the fault of the world then—that he could not feel,” nor Clarissa to conclude that “there were no Gods; no one was to blame” (MD 88, 78). How then does a society shape men to make war? How does it socialize women to raise sons for war? The traumatic aspects of many male initiation rituals suggest that war is no aberration from boys’ induction into the modern Western social order. In anthropologists’ broad descriptions of male initiation paradigms, the male child undergoes a painful separation from the mother and the early “green” (or natural) world that his culture identifies with her, followed by his symbolic death as his mother’s child and a second birth as his cultural fathers’ son.¹⁴ The “death” of his early self and the birth of a new one may unfold through actual or symbolic violence: a wounding or scarification of the body, or rituals involving a renaming, secret lore, a new identity. The question of agency, Bruce Lincoln argues, is crucial to interpreting whether a given rite effects a deforming violation or a transformative fulfillment of its subject.¹⁵

In Jacob’s case, his father Seabrook’s accidental death leaves a vacuum quickly filled by the surrogate fathers who take over his education: Mr. Floyd, who teaches the Flanders boys Latin, and Captain Barfoot, whose battle-maimed body foretells Jacob’s sacrificial destiny. Sailing with Timmy Durrant, young Jacob bathes naked in the sea, feels the boat’s hot seat, “gnaw[s] ham from the bone,” smells wildflowers on mainland breezes, gazes at the Scilly Isles, hears a faraway cry (JR 57). Captain Barfoot—Betty Flanders’s authority on how to educate her three sons—models masculinity as a culturally inflicted wound, his lame leg and missing fingers evidence that he has “served his country,” paid his dues to empire, earned his place as a representative of “law” and “order” who makes women feel “we must cherish this man” (JR 28). The counterpart of Seabrook as of Betty’s vanished (and aptly named) brother Morty (“lost all these years—had the natives got him, was his ship sunk”[JR 91]), the survivor Captain Barfoot displays the violated—and violating—male body as, in Scarry’s words, “a source of reality” that gives the sacrifice demanded by nation, empire, and war “force and holding power” (124, 128). He represents the long history of collective violence into which Jacob will be conscripted—the history that soon darkens the child’s originally transparent “pane of glass,” so that “to escape is vain” (JR 49). As Rachel Vinrace’s resistance brings to light the sacrificial dimensions of normative female initiation (here reprised in Ellen Barfoot, “civilization’s prisoner” in her bath chair), Jacob’s second birth from fathers fuels the perpetual unconscious reproduction of a war-making society’s “cultural fictions” and “cultural frauds,” which the sons’ bodies must substantiate (JR 25; Scarry, 124, 128).

Septimus’s amazement at his own living death—“I have been dead, and yet am now alive”—registers the violating suppression of feeling and connection that masculinity exacts and war intensifies. So, too, his hallucination of his friend Evans emerging from the trees in Regent’s Park wishfully misapprehends Evans’s war death as temporary and symbolic: “in Thessaly … they waited till the War was over” (MD 70). In the vignette on Jacob’s boyhood butterfly collecting, butterflies and moths—emblems of Greek Psyche or soul—flutter like free spirits in fields and gardens until caught, mounted, and labeled in boxes. One, eluding all published descriptions, evokes Jacob himself: “A tree had fallen the night he caught it. There had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the wood. And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late” (JR 23). Like the unclassified moth, the crashing tree allegorizes a dire initiatory moment when a natural being is sacrificed to culture (as Septimus urgently perceives, “Trees [a]re alive,” “Men must not cut down trees,” “do not cut down trees”).¹⁶ An “old cottage woman” who tells Jacob “of a purple butterfly which came every summer to her garden” stirs premonitions of male combat: “at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, she said” (JR 24).

But society is a mother as well as “a father” (TG 206). What induces women to give up their sons to masculinity and war making? Or, as Adrienne Rich asks, “How does the male child differentiate himself from his mother”; and must he “‘join the army,’ … internalize patriarchal values?”¹⁷ Male initiation symbolically removes the boy from his mother’s world by shaming his early identification with her so-called feminine traits, producing masculinity dialectically from that early, suppressed identification as the “emotional disengagement and uncontrolled aggression” that war demands.¹⁸ Jacob’s Room anticipates Three Guineas’ analysis of an early twentieth-century English public sphere that excludes women/mothers, leaving fathers to create public culture and values and to induct male children into that culture. In this society, the mother’s role is to produce the son and give him up to a public world in which fathers control law, political economy, and cultural representation.

To refuse to work for the army, a woman with three sons would have to be “somehow heroic,” as Betty Flanders has no thought of being (JR 154). Carrying on “the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles,” she assuages her sons’ anxiety by denying danger: “What’s all that water rushing in?” worries little Arthur. “‘It’s only the bath water running away,’ said Mrs. Flanders. … ‘I thought he’d never get off—such a hurricane,’ she whispered to Rebecca” (JR 12). This “conspiracy” of mothers and nurses fosters the illusion that the domestic sphere has nothing to do with the public sphere of “storms” and wars; is entirely safe from the troubles at home and abroad from which women like Clara and Betty wish men to protect them. By contrast, Mrs. Jarvis, far from cherishing men like Captain Barfoot, feels, “it’s the man’s stupidity that’s the cause of this [war], and the storm’s my storm as well as his” (JR 28). No less under the sway of illusion than those women of England who erect statues of Achilles to inspire their sons, Betty soothes her sons’ fear of the storm/war—the militaristic society into which they are already being initiated—so that, lulled into unconsciousness (“Think of the fairies”), they will not lie awake questioning but grow up to play their parts “uncomplainingly” (JR 12, 155). So Betty does herself, murmuring when awakened by the roar of guns, “Not at this distance … It is the sea … as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe?” (JR 175).

Betty Flanders dutifully hands Jacob on to Mr. Floyd (who teaches him the Latin language of men), Captain Barfoot, and the Cambridge dons—the “elderly of the race” who initiate him into their militaristic culture by a “muster” of ideas that “march” in “procession,” “orderly, quickstepping, and reinforced,” in cities that “show[] like … barracks and places of discipline” (JR 40, 36). Yet despite Betty’s conspiratorial mothering and his status as civilization’s inheritor, Jacob has his doubts. “Bloody beastly!” he expostulates after lunching with a don and his family; an essay with the skeptical title “Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” lies on his writing table; faced with lovely but uneducated Florinda, “He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and … the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus” (JR 35, 39, 82). Still, he “grow[s] to be a man” who is “about to be immersed in things,” disciplined by the “great machine” (JR 139). As the “utterly unconscious” Clara subliminally senses when the runaway horse gallops past Achilles’ statue, Jacob well learns the lesson crooned over him in the cradle—to substantiate in body and mind his civilization’s illusions.

It is not primarily Jacob who pursues the novel’s critical enterprise but the essayist-narrator. Edward L. Bishop observes that this narrator “is characterized more fully as a mimetic character, as an autonomous self, than the ostensible focus of the text” and explores the ways she and Jacob are “hailed” (“Hey, you there!”) as Althusserian subjects.¹⁹ Yet if she seems to us more “there” than Jacob, that is less because she is a “mimetic character” than because she is (as Bishop also observes) the novel’s “voice”—its breath and spirit, its sensibility and intelligence, its soul/psyche, the “hawk moth” that “hum[s] vibrating” over “the cavern of mystery” that is Jacob (Bishop 166, JR 73).

Barry Morgenstern argues that this “self-conscious” narrator must be distinguished from Woolf, and as a textual effect so she must.²⁰ Yet Jacob’s Room, we noted, marks Woolf’s discovery of how “to say something in my own voice.” Woolf began her career as an essayist and reviewer, honing her “voice” in many early unpublished pieces and publishing “more than half of her 500-plus articles, essays, and reviews” in the eighteen years preceding Jacob’s Room.²¹ Further, while writing “An Unwritten Novel” (1920), she conceived “a new form for a new novel” based on the loose, light method she had devised for it and “Kew Gardens”—stories that cleave close to the border between short story and personal essay (D 2:13–14, 26 January 1920). In short, the modernist form Woolf invented “more or less by chance” for Jacob’s Room is a hybrid of the essay, the short story, and the novel, carried by a breakthrough in narrative “voice.” Though her “own,” that voice is also freely impersonal, abstracted from “the damned egotistical self” that she felt “ruins” Joyce and Richardson (D 2:13–14, 26 January 1920). “Is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce & Richardson, narrowing & restricting?” Woolf wondered—her impersonal pronoun suggesting an answer by manifesting a self, a voice, that escapes the “thick little ego” to speak as “we” or “one.”²²

Unlike the third-person omniscient narrator of The Voyage Out, this essayist-narrator is at moments explicitly embodied. At times she seems simply a human presence, on a level with the people she observes and with her implied readers: an operagoer who laments that, in choosing a seat, she exiles herself from every other vantage; a traveler in Italy with dust on her shoes (an autobiographical traveler, familiar with Woolf’s travel notebooks) who marvels at how recently she was riding an omnibus in Piccadilly; a passenger in a carriage following Clara and her mother in Long Acre who interrupts herself in mid-sentence so as not to block the way (JR 136, 174). At other moments she seems female, as when she registers a “difference of sex” on watching Jacob’s dawning recognition of Florinda’s infidelity: “Granted ten years’ seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first” (though the grammar makes the referent of this difference less than certain) (JR 94–95). Such moments strategically shatter any illusion of narrative omniscience and invite the engaged, writerly reading that—Woolf “venture[s] to remind” modern readers—is their “dut[y] and responsibilit[y]”: “in the course of your daily lives this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe,” yet “you” make the “fatal mistake” of supposing “that writers are different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more … than you do” (CDB 118). Or, as the essayist-narrator puts it, “fill in the sketch as you like” (JR 96).

By the same token, the crucial feature of this modernist essayist-narrator who invites collaboration is less her interpellation as a cultural subject than her Houdinilike escape from convention.²³ If, as Beauvoir says, one is not born a woman, the essayist-narrator is a “woman” only as it suits her—as when she presses her nose to the window of Jacob’s Cambridge world to describe the don within slipping words that are at once coins and communion wafers into young men’s minds, where they “dissolve … like silver.” Whereas, thus infused with sacralized “manliness,” the students “respect” this sacred cultural coin until they grow old, when “the silver disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same—a Greek boy’s head,” a “woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise” (JR 40–41). Here the essayist-narrator embraces interpellation as “feminine” only to turn it into a critical outsider’s perspective (adumbrating those later outsiders, Three Guineas’ epistolary persona and the playwright/director La Trobe). She does not passively submit to the “feminine” position assigned her but mimes it (in Irigaray’s sense), parodies it, exploits its potential for resistance and critique, takes it apart and discards it like the social masquerade it is, like those “parts of a woman” she sees “shown separate” in “Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue”: “In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in the middle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on Temple Bar were hats—emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneath deep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet—pointed gold, or patent leather slashed with scarlet.”²⁴ One is not born a “woman”: the accoutrements in the window comically mirror the deconstructed femininity the narrator puts on and steps out of at will to become a naked soul, all eyes, seeing but not seen.²⁵

As the essayist-narrator who isn’t born a “woman” both parodies and eludes social embodiment, she plays out the stakes of such consciousness through Julia Hedge, Clara Durrant, and Miss Umphelby, who aren’t born women either but don’t know it, at least not with such freedom. Miss Umphelby, despite her melodious, accurate Virgil, is plagued by worries over what she would wear were she to meet the immortal poet. Clara’s is, Bonamy marvels, “an existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe,” so that “to speak” is “unnatural to her” (JR 152, 166). “Unfortunate Julia!” (as the narrator characterizes her) waits for books that don’t come, pile up, fall over, distracted by the all-male pantheon inscribed around the brow of the old British Library reading room and by young men like Jacob who swim effortlessly with the current in their intellectual endeavors while she labors arduously upstream, “Death and gall and bitter dust” dragging on her pen-tip (JR 106). Resenting his slightly “regal and pompous” bearing, his air of being one of the “six young men” on whom “the flesh and blood of the future” depend, “Julia Hedge disliked him naturally enough” (JR 107).

Like the woman crying, “Let me in!” all night in the mews while the oblivious Jacob is engrossed in the Phaedrus, Julia Hedge is part of the essayist-narrator’s critique of the civilization Jacob inherits to his cost. But whereas Julia’s feminist consciousness is reactive, a contingent, negative artifact of “the great patriarchal machine,” the essayist-narrator roams freely between society’s self-display and its hidden cracks and crevices. The narrator who cries “Unfortunate Julia!” is at one level utterly in sympathy with her; but rather than wait for and react to other people’s books, she casts off a virtual self in Julia while herself eluding body, sex, and gender. The essayist-narrator exists not as a socially constructed “woman” but as a supple, open, analytic sensibility who explores postwar public and private worlds with unimpeded curiosity and desire. Observing not just civilization’s dead monuments but the life that teems around them, she writes the books that Julia Hedge is almost too oppressed to know she is waiting for.

This is not to say that the essayist-narrator’s “difference of sex” is immaterial to her social investigations. In late 1920, while writing Jacob’s Room, Woolf wrote two high-spirited letters to the editor of the New Statesman to rebut “Affable Hawk”/Desmond MacCarthy’s review of Arnold Bennett’s Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord, in which he complacently asserts that no amount of education will ever entirely overcome women’s innate intellectual inferiority. Comparing “the Duchess of Newcastle with Jane Austen, the matchless Orinda with Emily Brontë, Mrs Heywood with George Eliot, Aphra Behn with Charlotte Brontë, Jane Grey with Jane Harrison,” Woolf argues that

the advance in intellectual power seems not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be overrated. In short, though pessimism about the other sex is always delightful and invigorating, it seems a little sanguine of Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk to indulge in it with such certainty on the evidence before them.

In the same vein, she drily adds, however tempted women might be to conclude from the spectacle of mindless slaughter “that the intellect of the male sex is steadily diminishing, it would be unwise, until they have more evidence than the great war and the great peace supply, to announce it as a fact” (CS 123). Citing J. A. Symonds on the civilization that produced Sappho—“‘highly educated,’” accustomed to free association with men and free expression “‘to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time,’” Woolf argues that in any civilized society women must have education, “liberty of experience,” and freedom to “differ from men” openly and without fear (CS 125–26). Indeed Woolf makes women’s freedom the index of civilization’s degree and quality: until women can think, speak, and create fearlessly, she writes, “we” (men and women) “shall remain in a condition of half-civilised barbarism. At least that is how I define an eternity of dominion on the one hand and of servility on the other. For the degradation of being a slave is only equalled by the degradation of being a master” (CS 127).

Granting the essayist-narrator’s difference from “Woolf,” her musings on the Greek “illusion” suggest that she would not take exception to this criterion of civilization. By this standard, neither Achilles’ war culture nor the modern England that keeps it alive by erecting heroic statues and molding little boys in their images ranks very high. In the Iliad, after all, it is not just Achilles’ divine anger or the Homeric gods that reshape reciprocal slaughter into a plot of sacralized tragedy. Both the great conflict between Greeks and Trojans and the quarrel between Greek leaders Agamemnon and Achilles hinge on a pervasive violence against women, who are indeed enslaved to men as sexual and domestic labor and, not least, trophies of their “dominion.” Thus Helen is an object of mimetic rivalry between Paris and Menelaus; Khrysêis, between Khrysês and Agamemnon; Brisêis, between Agamemnon and Achilles. Within the poem this violence is not merely unexamined but so deeply naturalized that Achilles can make peace with Agamemnon on returning to battle by offering up a symbolic human sacrifice of Brisêis: “Agamemnon, was it better for us/in any way, when we were sore at heart,/to waste ourselves in strife over a girl?/If only Artemis had shot her down/among the ships on the day I made her mine … !”²⁶

“While mimetic rivalries, kept women, and sexual triangles endure from Homer to Jacob’s Room, they now come under the essayist-narrator’s skeptical gaze. If women provide the “illusion” that undergirds the Iliad’s tragic and glorious war story, Jacob’s Room at once exploits and deconstructs this illusion, excavating the prostitute from the unexamined collective unconscious and bringing “public” women and sexual triangles into the light of day. Not coincidentally, the essayist-narrator sandwiches her meditation on the “strange … love of Greek” shared by Timmy and Jacob between viewings of the prostitute Florinda. Florinda sits on Jacob’s knee as “did all good women in the days of the Greeks”; then he sees her “turning up Greek Street on another man’s arm” (JR 76, 94). Her name—bestowed by a painter “who wished it to signify” the “unplucked” “flower of her maidenhood”—frames Florinda as an artifact (or “illusion”) of masculine fantasy and, further, makes her an ironic synecdoche of women’s sexual enslavement in both ancient Greek and modern European civilizations—an emblem, like ancient Greece itself, of young men’s “dominion”:

As she ponders Florinda’s sexuality, the essayist-narrator dwells with sibylline delicacy on the obsession with chastity in Western life and art. “Whether or not she was a virgin seems a matter of no importance whatever,” she proposes, “Unless,” she adds, “indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all”:

All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else was talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter of no importance at all.

What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley—choose whom you like—the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of us pass reputably, or with only the sort of tremor that a snake makes sliding through the grass. But then concealment by itself distracts the mind from the print and the sound. If Florinda had had a mind, she might have read with clearer eyes than we can. (JR 79)

What clear-eyed readings of her culture would Florinda have produced if she had had a mind? If the “great patriarchal machine” has molded Florinda to use her head less to critique modern civilization than to uphold it, like the caryatids of the Erechtheum, the mere idea of her prostitute’s-eye view illuminates a deep structural continuity between the male desire that drives the Iliad’s plot and the unconscious forces that fuel the modern social machine. Looking virtually at modern civilization through Florinda’s clear eyes, the essayist-narrator brings its seamy underside, its barbaric unconscious, into view.²⁷

The essayist-narrator—who is, as we have noted, anything but an exemplary subject—resists the cultural police (“Hey, you there!”). She ignores her culture’s hailings into the proper, conventional, normative feminine positions so impeccably mastered by Clara Durrant and instead hails back from such out-of-the-way places as Florinda’s mind if she had had one and other byways to which her curiosity about criminals, women, and other “outcast[s] from civilization” takes her (JR 96). If Florinda herself cannot articulate the prostitute’s perspective on civilization’s “illusion” that she so valuably marks, it is indirectly elaborated by the other women the essayist-narrator brings out of civilization’s woodwork: the widow Betty Flanders (recalling the case of “the widow” that Rachel poses to Richard Dalloway), “civilization’s prisoner” the crippled Ellen Barfoot, the trammeled Clara, the prostitute Laurette, the artist’s model Fanny Elmer, the narcissist Sandra Wentworth Williams, the old English woman who sings “not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful, tanned heart” outside the Bank, and the old Greek woman who condemns “the whole of civilization” in “refus[ing] to budge” to let a tram pass beneath Jacob’s hotel window in Patras (VO 66, JR 67, 138).

Although the male desire that shapes the Iliad’s plot plays through the Greek illusion of Jacob’s Room, women sing their desire in every crevice of the social structure the essayist-narrator explores. Julia Hedge wants an expanded canon, Mrs. Jarvis dreams of joining the storms and wars of the public world, and a whole gamut of women want Jacob, even creating (with Bonamy) sexual triangles around him: Clara in mute longing, Sandra by compulsive seduction, Fanny with idealizing passion, Florinda in dumb affection as she embarks on an ambitious reading program in hope of winning his love. Whether these women’s knowing yet complicit yearnings are of no importance whatever or the only thing of any importance at all remains an open question. If women’s desires are never proposed as the cause of the Great War, there is still that curious scene in which Clara, Achilles, “the women of England,” the riderless horse, and the ominously absent Jacob converge as if fortuitously under the essayist-narrator’s gaze.

For his part, Jacob suffers from “modern gloom” as he plays the “diligent” tourist in Greece, duly following his guidebook’s directive to observe “the slight irregularity in the line of the steps ‘which the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy’” (JR 149). Having discovered that, wherever he goes, there he is—never more so than in the presence of those ruined monuments his education teaches him to revere—he begins “to think a great deal about the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us” (JR 149). As with Florinda, who does as “all good women” in the days of the Greeks, the more things change the more they remain the same. Civilization’s problems devolve upon women as Jacob reverts to Achilles’ age-old “solution”: “‘Damn these women … How they spoil things … It is those damned women,’ said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be.” (Here the essayist-narrator comments helpfully, “This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks” [JR 151].) Only momentarily does Jacob follow youth’s mandate, “Detest your own age. Build a better one” (JR 107). Would he have pursued a better one had he lived to father a family and direct a bank? In any case, it is not lost on the essayist-narrator that Jacob “never read modern novels.”²⁸

The revision sharpens Woolf’s modernist “re-form” of the novel by shifting the accent from feelings to questions, from the dead to the living, from the past to the future, and from a conventional story to “a disconnected rhapsody”—her own description of the novel as she wondered what reviewers might say, one that inscribes Jacob’s Room within the Western epic tradition begun by the ancient bards or rhapsodes (rhapsōidoi) who developed the materials of the Homeric poems through oral performance.³⁰

In tossing out those earlier closing lines, Woolf broke the graceful circle back to the opening scene of Betty Flanders’s tearful letter writing and Jacob’s stubborn insistence on dragging home his memento mori, the sheep’s jaw found on the beach. She disrupts formal symmetry and closure to leave questions echoing in the air. “Did he think he would come back?” (JR 176). And now that his body feeds crows in Flanders, who will step into his shoes—put on his authority, write his essays on civilization, inherit the public world and build its “better” future, as he once expected to do? The tone of these questions is not, to my ear, despair or even grief. By contrast with Pound’s bitter mourning in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and T. S. Eliot’s desolate melancholy in The Waste Land, Woolf’s essayist-narrator has put mourning behind her and writes a “disconnected rhapsody” for those who are still here—the war’s survivors, for whom life is a narrow pavement over an abyss. Permanently changed by a catastrophic war but all the more urgently alive for her experiences of loss, she leaves off the “intolerable weariness” of “looking at monuments” through guidebooks, stories, illusions, and calls her readers to venture with her onto that narrow pavement over an abyss that is modern consciousness (JR 136). Like that of Between the Acts, the ending of Jacob’s Room symbolically delivers us to the first moment of all future historical time.

Adventurous, curious, free, yet attuned to the tragedy and agony of life for her generation, the essayist-narrator models a modernist soul or psyche for whom there are no stories nor any divinities on whom to blame a “botched civilization”; and for whom life is, in any case, a horse that will eventually throw you, whether your civilization is botched or not. Even if you could silence the guns of Western Europe, let the clocks of modern time run down, free the spirit from its bondage to civilization, there would still be the sheep’s jaw. Or, as the narrator observes, “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses” (JR 82). Life, marked off by death before, between, and beyond the shaping powers of civilization and culture, remains an “unseizable force” that even a modern novel can’t capture or still. Holding out not a story at which to warm ourselves but Jacob’s shoes, Jacob’s Room wordlessly mirrors the modern condition of walking out on a little strip of pavement over an abyss.

In the same spirit, Jacob’s Room’s demystification of narrative authority makes it less a “sketchbook artist”’s work than an epic canvas on which its essayist-narrator paints civilization’s “problems” in modernity’s disillusioning yet revelatory light.³¹ Like The Waste Land and The Cantos, Jacob’s Room registers its epic ambition through allusion. The essayist-narrator weaves echoes of classical texts into her own, as if mirroring fragments of the Parthenon in the British Museum; but while Fanny seeks “Jacob’s presence” in “the battered Ulysses,” the essayist-narrator highlights significant differences of time and place (JR 170). Consider, for example, her turn on perhaps the most famous of all epic similes, which likens a thousand Trojan campfires arrayed across the plain to a starry sky:

… As when in heaven

principal stars shine out around the moon

when the night sky is limpid, with no wind,

and all the lookout points, headlands, and mountain

clearings are distinctly seen, as though

pure space had broken through, downward from heaven,

and all the stars are out, and in his heart

the shepherd sings: just so from ships to river

shone before Ilion the Trojan fires.

There were a thousand burning in the plain,

and round each one lay fifty men in firelight.

Horses champed white barley, near the chariots,

waiting for Dawn to mount her lovely chair.

(Iliad 8, 198–99)

Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer’s day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain. (JR 163, my emphases)

In keeping with its tragic war plot, the Iliad celebrates making within unmaking, natural and cultural orders within the spectacle of reciprocal violence. By contrast, the rhapsode of Jacob’s Room celebrates human battles against not an “enemy” people but the destructive forces of nature and time. Her staging of everyday life as a splendid battleground at once registers the violent work of nature, time, and death and celebrates the tragic beauty of their given order. For her the violence of everyday life is heroic enough, a spectacle on a par with Homer’s sublime panorama of warriors’ campfires under the stars: she sings a conflict in which humans oppose chaos and those absolute, unvanquishable enemies, “time and eternity,” glimpsed through the “skirts and waistcoats” of social time (JR 168). Under her gaze life reveals itself as mortal combat against these most awesome of all forces, an inescapable contest that, no matter how bravely fought, must always be lost—as the “always punctual” Julia Eliot, herself watching the runaway horse gallop past Achilles’ statue, is made aware, involuntarily seeing in her mind’s eye all “people passing tragically to destruction” (JR 168).

To return to Achilles’ statue at Hyde Park Corner, what we notice now is not only Clara’s unconscious, hysterical, helpless grief but how the statue is draped all around with domestic objects—how the social life of people and things counterpoints the Greek illusion: “The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly, lightly observant” (JR 167). If the riderless horse suggests the “unseizable force” of social history, that galloping allegory of England’s unconscious plunge toward the war that brings Jacob’s death also recalls that “wild horse in us,” the sheer animal life force, and, through Thoby (Woolf’s model for Jacob and Percival), the horse that throws Percival in The Waves (JR 141).

Even as this darker revelation shadows Clara’s white-knuckled confrontation with the existential modernity contingently brought home to a whole generation by the war, it is also profoundly independent of it. War or no war, death is the enemy of a life poised on the abyss, even in Homer.³² In the Iliad, the greatest war story and the greatest antiwar story ever told, even Achilles must choose between going to war to make a hero’s name inseparable from the fiction of Greece he defends and going AWOL to lead a long contented life at home. Nor does the great name he chooses over long life—the honor and glory that Odysseus extols when he meets Achilles’ shade in Hades among “the after images of used up men”—assuage death’s pain or repay his lost years of life, as he bitterly attests: “Let me hear no smooth talk/of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils/Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand/for some poor country man, on iron rations,/than lord it over all the exhausted dead.”³³

In “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), Woolf links the Greek war stories’ underlying awareness of death as the unvanquishable enemy with her generation’s experience of modern war:

In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. … But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet being dead they have not died.” They could say, “If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence … we lie possessed of praise that grows not old.” … With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. (CR 34, 38)

Writing to the aspiring novelist Gerald Brenan on Christmas 1922, two months after Jacob’s Room appeared, Woolf described her generation’s experiments with literary form in terms that anticipate the modernist manifesto “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: “The human soul it seems to me orientates itself afresh every now & then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole therefore. … life has to be faced: to be rejected; then accepted on new terms with rapture” (L 2:598–99). In the same spirit, Jacob’s Room’s disconnected rhapsody seeks not only to re-form the novel but to orient the reader afresh, not by offering a story’s warmth but by modeling a skeptical, critical, analytic, life-loving sensibility—a subject who resists the hailings of the “social machine,” who refuses to “suffocate uncomplainingly” (JR 155). If, as Marshall Berman contends, “we don’t know how to use our modernism,” if we have “missed or broken the connection between our culture and our lives,” “lost the art of putting ourselves in the picture, of recognizing ourselves as participants and protagonists in the art and thought of our time,” Jacob’s Room recalls its readers to that “art.”³⁴ It gives itself up to be read only as we abandon our unregenerate longing for stories and illusions to embrace its disconnected rhapsody. For, as Adorno observed, modernist art is no more obscure than traditional art.³⁵ It’s just that—like Clara, or like Jacob, who “never read modern novels”—we would sometimes rather not face what it reveals.