Caring about lyricality

ABSTRACT

This article offers a close reading of Laura Marcus’s styles of close reading, taking as its point of departure a lockdown recording (in spring 2020) of her lyrical rendition of the ‘Time Passes’ section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The essay pays particular attention to the enduring place lyricality occupied in Marcus’s critical imagination, both as an object of analysis and as a feature of her own prose. David James argues that Marcus often modelled a mode of critical practice oriented around affectively attentive, densely exemplified, and above all intimate explications of literary expression – a practice whose lyrical textures were themselves a performative affirmation of what that intimacy could creatively and analytically achieve.

KEYWORDS:

• Laura Marcus
• lyricality
• care
• close reading
• Virginia Woolf
• intimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 175.

2 Naturalists worked fast to give an account of that period: see Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott, and Peter Marren, The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2020).

3 Laura Marcus, ‘New College Reads to You: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. Video by Christopher Thompson, audio by Dan Jefferies, and produced by Erica Longfellow, Christopher Skelton-Foord, and Sam Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_jE6cxRm8E Given that I make extensive reference to this video in what follows, readers may wish to view the recording (5 mins, 15 secs in its entirety) before continuing with the essay.

4 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 175–76.

5 Ibid., p. 176.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., p. 175.

8 Ibid., p. 176.

9 Ibid., p. 175

10 Ibid., pp. 175, 176.

11 Diana Fuss, Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 6, 5.

12 Fuss, Dying Modern, 7.

13 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 148.

14 Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 253.

15 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 146.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn. (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004), p. 99.

19 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 146.

20 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 267–68.

21 Ibid., p. 268, my emphasis.

22 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 155.

23 Marcus, Virginia Woolf, pp. 109–10.

24 Ibid., p. 110.

25 Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 231–32.

26 Andrew H. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 178.

27 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 218.

28 Jo Winning movingly relays how much she loved accompanying Laura to galleries, trips that often were made possible (as I remember with such humour and affection) only by playing truant from conferences. As Winning recalls, throughout an exhibition, Laura ‘had this wonderful mix of curiosity and erudition’ (Winning, ‘Laura Marcus [7 March 1956–22 September 2021]’, ed. George Potts and Santanu Das, Critical Quarterly, 64.1 [2022], p. 16).

29 Marcus, Virginia Woolf, p. 31.

30 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 353.

31 Marcus, Dreams of Modernity, p. 227.

32 Woolf, Saturday 30 October 1926, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1925–30, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1980), p. 114.

33 Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), quoted in Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 148.

34 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 153.

35 Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 55.

36 Marcus, Dreams of Modernity, p. 226.

37 Sigmund Freud, p. 239: To Ludwige Binswanger (11 April 1929), in Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 386.

38 Laura Marcus, ‘The Legacies of Modernism’, in Morag Shiach (ed,), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 96.

39 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 115.

40 Isobel Armstrong, in George Potts and Santanu Das, eds., ‘Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)’, Critical Quarterly, 64.1 (2022), p. 14.

41 Marcus, Virginia Woolf, p. 93.

42 Woolf, Tuesday 23 November 1926, Diary, pp. 117–18.

43 Following Iris Murdoch, Namwali Serpell observes that

literature and ethical deliberation have this in common: they are very complex, variable, temporal processes of thinking that don’t necessarily bear on external acts. This should both encourage us to use literature to deliberate about ethics and remind us that to deliberate is not the same as to act.

But she then adds that in a time of crisis we ‘can keep writing and reading and thinking – it soothes, if nothing else – but it won’t necessarily do anything to save us right now’ (Serpell in conversation Maria Tumarkin ‘Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy: Two Writers on the Ethics of Pen and Paper’, The Yale Review, https://yalereview.org/article/namwali-serpell-tumarkin-unethical-reading-and-limits-empathy). Anna Kornbluh has been even more strident about reclaiming critique as the scene and source of literary studies’ tangible interventions:

We must, in the present, make claims about causality, systematicity, and the revaluation of values, so we can make the very specific move to counter rapacious greed with rapid decarbonization. …  Critique and its cartography of other spaces enjoins us to stand up.

As such, ‘Wild imaginings, big abstractions, and brassy syntheses are less bad’ than the ‘resignation’ of ‘weak theory’ or ‘postcritique’ (‘Extinct Critique’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 119.4 [October 2020], p. 775). This kind of evangelising about criticism’s ability to confront the world’s escalating emergencies has neatly dovetailed with what John Guillory describes as the prominence of ‘topicality’ through ‘the foregrounding of political thematics in teaching and scholarship, along the claims for the socially transformative effects of these thematics’. With research and pedagogical agendas alike thereby ‘reoriented’ around ‘concepts and problems defined by their contemporary relevance’, it should come as no surprise that the ‘overestimation’ of literary scholarship’s real-world effects, suggests Guillory, has become a symptomatically dominant response to the discipline’s own social and institutional precarities. Consequently, the inflation of criticism’s hypothetical agency acts ‘as a compensatory response to uncertainty of aim’ within the increasingly corporatized university (Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022], pp. xii, xiii, 9, 10).

44 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 106.

45 Woolf, Saturday 11 December 1926, Diary, p. 119.