Turnings and Re-Turnings
Mary Ann Caws
I’d like to investigate various types of turn, not just the linguistic turn or the philosophical turn or any turn of events or serious paradigm shift, rather a modest and often merely metaphoric or visual bend in something as everyday as a road. As an example, I would take Nicolas de Staël’s Road in the Vaucluse, which leads off the canvas into or onto somewhere else. Part of the point is not knowing where, another part is my acquaintance with the region and still another is my obsession with this particular turning. I’d like to see where such a rumination, first an example of the visual, then a meditation on things verbal and imaginative, might lead.
Here is my initial thought: that modernism now is not so much about meanings but more about, or at least as much about, what something turns and points to. Turnings call for a turning into, turnings involve a going back incessantly more than going forward. I am fascinated by re-turnings, inturnings and turning aside, as in the so celebrated and celebratory theatre asides. Modernism is, as I see it, about learning by turning, not by just going straight ahead.
So let me take further examples than the visual de Staël that began my rumination. First, because it is so intensely visual (see Luchino Visconti’s brilliant film), let me take the gorgeous and haunting visage and figure of Tadzio, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1963). We are looking at Tadzio in his striped linen suit with red breast-knot, walking on the shore by the sea, where he is visible and takes all the space:
He paced there, divided by an expanse of water from the shore, from his mates by his moody pride, a remote and isolated figure, with floating locks, out there in sea and wind, against the misty inane. Once more he paused to look: with a sudden recollection, or by an impulse, he turned from the waist up, in an exquisite movement, one hand resting on his hip, and looked over his shoulder at the shore . . . (Mann 1963: 74; my emphasis)
And Aschenbach looks on, simply qualified as ‘the watcher’, as he sits, rests his head and then lifts his head, ‘as if it were to Tadzio’s gaze . . .’:
It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though, with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation. And, as so often before, he rose to follow. (Mann 1963: 75)
It gives you a gulp in the chest, this turning. In the magnificent filmed version, you see Tadzio half-turn, as in a pose of contrapposto, just like the famous Ballthrower, as does every pose in a counterpose.
A RETURNING TO MEMORY
This turn deserves the other to which we often refer, since Virginia Woolf always is on every modernist menu, and we have with us a great Woolf specialist, Catherine Bernard, with whom I have so enjoyed speaking before, in the French Association of Virginia Woolf scholars. Here, from To the Lighthouse, is that grand passage of the children’s rhyme, ‘Luriana Lurilee’, which works, as Andre Gerard (2014) points out, as a homage to the love between Mr and Mrs Ramsay or Leonard and Virginia:
As if a dialogue, her unspoken thoughts: ‘And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.’ The words seem to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self . . . what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. She knew that everyone at the table was listening to the voice saying:
I wonder if it seems to you,
Luriana, Lurilee
. . . then Augustus Carmichael had risen, and stood chanting:
To see the Kings go riding by
Over lawn and daisy lea
With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,
Luriana, Lurilee,
and as she passed him he turned slightly towards her repeating the last words:
Luriana, Lurilee
come out and climb the garden path,
Luriana Lurilee.
The china rose is all bloom and buzzin with the yellow bee.
. . . She knew, without looking round, that every one at the table was listening to the voice saying:
I wonder if it seems to you, Luriana, Lurilee . . .
But the voice stopped. She looked round. She made herself get up. Augustus Carmichael had risen and, holding his table napkin so that it looked like a long white robe he stood chanting:
To see the Kings go riding by . . .
And as she passed him, he turned slightly toward her, repeating the last words:
Luriana, lurilee
And bowed to her as if he did her homage. . . . she returned his bow and passed through the door . . .
It was necessary to carry everything a step further . . . It changed, it shaped itself differently: it had become, she knew, flinging one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (Woolf 1981: 110–11)
This is the famous look over the shoulder, so the turn, implied, does not have to be even mentioned, it is present.
My own implication here is that the turn, as the returning, scarcely needs emphasis: in modernist writings we know so well, it is simply there. Like Clarissa, it is there and we could end upon it.
Andre Gerard (2014) has commented on this passage, which Leonard Woolf knew as ‘A Garden Song’ by Charles Isaac Elton, and which he noted down in his copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and recited to Virginia, before it appeared in Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s 1946 anthology Another World Than This. The Vita and Harold version has the line ‘Till you sleep in a humble heap’ whereas the Woolf version reads ‘Till you sleep in a bramble heap’ – significant because the word bramble appears several times in To the Lighthouse (Gerard 2014). So, Gerard posits, this is a communion between Leonard and Virginia. He also points out the ‘waving leaves’ in the anthology and the ‘changing leaves’ in Virginia’s recitation . . . no less significant:
Come out and climb the garden-path, Luriana Lurillee
The China-rose is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee,
We’ll swing you on the cedar-bough, Luriana Lurillee
I wonder if it seems to you, Luriana Lurillee,
That all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
Are full of trees and waving leaves, Luriana Lurillee.
. . .
Swing, swing on the cedar-bough, Luriana Lurillee,
Till you sleep in a bramble heap or under the gloomy churchyard-tree
And then fly back to swing on a bough, Luriana Lurillee. (Woolf 1981: 110; my emphasis)
Mrs Ramsay continues to murmur this unforgettable unknown poem, which is actually ‘A Garden Song’:
all the lives we ever lived
and all the lives to be
are full of trees and changing leaves (Woolf 1981: 110)
In the original, it seems that in Leonard’s copy, it reads ‘waving leaves’. That it should be ‘changing’ in To the Lighthouse as opposed to ‘waving’ seems equally important, in such a novel of change and loss and recovering and vision, but that is not my point here (see McBee n.d.).
I wonder if it seems to you
Luriana Lurilee
That all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and waving leaves,
Luriana Lurilee. (Woolf 1981: 111)
Then Mrs Ramsay reads from a book on the table:
She did not know at first what the words meant at all
Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners
she read . . . ‘Nor praise the deep vermillion in the rose,’ she read and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. . . . she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete . . . the sonnet. (Woolf 1981: 119, 121)
This is of course Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98 ‘From you have I been absent in the spring’, and as she reads, Mr Ramsay finds her astonishingly beautiful:
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play,
she finished.
‘Well?’ she said, echoing his smile dreaming, looking up from her book.
As with your shadow I with these did play,
she murmured, putting the book on the table. (Woolf 1981: 121)
But there is a further turn, in the boat at the end, and this turn takes upon itself to overcome the so mournful words that Mr Ramsay is fond of, is used to, quoting:
Mr. Ramsay had seen himself walking on the terrace, alone . . . Sitting in the boat, he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part – the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft . . . and said gently and mournfully,
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he . . .
Cam half started on her seat. . . . The movement roused her father: and he shuddered and broke off, exclaiming: ‘Look! Look!’ so urgently that James also turned his head to look over his shoulder at the island. They all looked. They looked at the island. (Woolf 1981: 166)
And now it is explicit, near the end of this valuable book, this turn made by James, whose trip it was supposed to be in the beginning, to that lighthouse by which we, so many of us, measure our voyage and our glance and our seeing: this is our look also.
Most urgently, and lastly, we recognise Mr Ramsay’s reciting, repeatedly, these lines:
We perished . . . each alone
. . .
But I beneath rougher sea (Woolf 1981: 165–6)
Of course, this is part of something longer, from William Cowper’s 1799 poem ‘The Castaway’:
No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. (Cowper 2016)
And the point is not, here, our recognition or not, but his ‘usual spams of repentance or shyness’ in reciting it, and then after again murmuring ‘But I beneath a rougher sea’ he is heard – as he means to be, sighing and saying,
gently and mournfully,
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he (Woolf 1981: 166)
But finally, when Mr Ramsay was about:
James and Cam were afraid, to burst out:
But I beneath a rougher sea
and if he did, they could not bear it; they would shriek aloud; they could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him . . . But at last he said, triumphantly, ‘Well done!’ (Woolf 1981: 206)
Even as we all hear the lines, we all feel triumphant in his not sighing and not saying them, unexpected as is his silence now, and his compliment. It seems to me that every time we reread To the Lighthouse, this nonspeaking of what we continue to hear increases its power, so that the entire recitation, memory and final unspeaking lets us have all our own visions, not just Lily alone.
Echoing through The Waves of 1931 are not just the ‘waving leaves’ of that same ‘Garden Song’ shortened into The Waves, but also the lines from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, instantly recognisable by many, in its blowing through Louis’s mind in its sorrowful sweep.
As for that last act that cannot be finished, Between the Acts (1941), it will have to start on a nursery rhyme:
The King is in his counting house
Counting out his money
The Queen is in her parlour (Woolf 1940: 115)
And then the tune starts over, and does not come to an end:
The King is in his counting house
Counting out his money
The Queen is in her parlour
Eating . . .
Suddenly the tune stopped. The tune changed . . .
The tune changed; snapped; broke; jagged. (Woolf 1940: 122)
We can all finish, because each of us in the reading audience remembers, remembers. That is of course what we have always returned towards. And so it is in us that the resolution is made, that each of us makes, for all of us – which is real sharing, between the author and the audience. This is, after all, the point. While we wait for what the Queen is eating, we know it’s bread and honey and then it doesn’t come upon rereading and we know Mrs. Ramsay will be finished between parentheses, we see a prediction of her disappearance, and she will not be returning.
But the reassurance of what everyone knows is what we return to, and this one ends as it should:
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King. (Woolf 1940: 195)
The King is no longer in his counting house but on the throne, and we have, all of us, moved on from a nursery rhyme to a hymn recited by a whole country. So it has gone from Macaulay and Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare – what we may remember or not, from the learned and ultra learned, in Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915), through a shared poem Leonard had said to Virginia, all the way to the unresolved nursery rhyme in Between the Acts, those most well-known verses we find in our memories and therefore for which we can and must complete the resolution in our own selves. We have finally to turn to resolving what is incomplete.
Of course, we can look up ‘my home is at Windsor, close to the Inn’, and can be ironically amused by how many hotels want to put us up as we are researching the lines, if we feel ironic in that moment. But the point I want to make is not that. It is not a point about irony, but about life, not always the same thing. It is this: wherever we might be, in our counting houses and in our parlours, and whatever childhood or grown-up memory it might bring back, we probably have to listen to the incompletion, and manage to complete it from our own selves, turning towards it, and towards our own remembering. It sounds and reads as if it were indeed about our own lives, learning not to wait for the honey, as if it were to be about going on with it.
ALWAYS TO END WITH
I want to end on, very simply, Marcel Proust’s Search, as we refer to it in English: here is the passage from the third volume, or Time Regained, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Here, the end is near, and we should indeed end upon this point:
The mind has landscapes which it is allowed to contemplate only for a certain space of time. In my life I had been like a painter climbing a road high above a lake, a view of which is denied to him by a curtain of rocks and trees. Suddenly through a gap in the curtain he sees the lake, its whole expanse is before him, he takes up his brushes. But already the night is at hand, the night which will put an end to his painting and which no dawn will follow. (Proust 1981: 1092)
So this landscape is the final one to which we turn, and – though we are not painters, most of us, but only writers, and as such, deeply moved by the way Proust is ending his work, not as the cathedral it is, but as the most modest of objects, such as one made with Françoise, constructing something towards which we finally turn, in utter simplicity:
And . . . I thought that at my big deal table, under the eyes of Françoise . . . I should work beside her and in a way almost as she worked herself . . . and, pinning here and there an extra page, I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress. (Proust 1981: 1090)
WORKS CITED
Cowper, William (2016), ‘The Castaway (1799)’, in Robert J. DeMaria, Jr. (ed.), British Literature: An Anthology 1640–1789, 4th edn, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, p. 1027, reprinted in Kim Provost McBee (n.d.), ‘Poetry in To The Lighthouse’, available at <http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthouse_poems.pdf> (last accessed 19 December 2016).
Death in Venice, film, directed by Luchino Visconti. Italy: Warner Bros., 1971.
Gerard, Andre (2014), ‘Blog #129: Charles Elton’s “A Garden Song” and To the Lighthouse Brambles’, 13 January, available at <http://patremoirpress.com/blog/?p=1236> (last accessed 19 December 2016).
McBee, Kim Provost (n.d.), ‘Poetry in To The Lighthouse’, available at <http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthouse_poems.pdf> (last accessed 19 December 2016)
Mann, Thomas (1963), Death in Venice, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Vintage.
Proust, Marcel (1981), Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 3 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, New York: Random House.
Sackville-West, Vita and Harold Nicolson (1946), Another World Than This, London: Michael Joseph.
Woolf, Virginia (1940), Between the Acts, New York: Mariner.
Woolf, Virginia (1981), To the Lighthouse, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.