ABSTRACT
This essay charts the presence of Virginia Woolf in Laura’s work, not only in Virginia Woolf (1997) but in 12 articles and every critical study she wrote, from Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) to the posthumously published Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (2023). Throughout this work cinema and psychoanalysis (both of which Woolf knew and studied intimately) are discourses used with great subtlety to explore the structural and imaginative shaping of the novels.
A colleague records that during a game of ‘Which novel would you like to be?’ Laura instantly replied, ‘To the Lighthouse’. Her delight in Woolf’s work was lifelong: Woolf’s work was formative and special for her. Her imaginative engagement with Woolf showed itself in every major book in her scholarly career and in innumerable articles.
In this brief note on Laura and Virginia Woolf my aim is twofold. First to give the reader an idea of the huge range and extent of Laura’s writing on Virginia Woolf. Second, to explore the unique reading of Woolf that Laura developed throughout her long engagement with the writer. Through her searching and attentive readings she fused a cinematic and psychoanalytic reading of Woolf. Of course this was based on empirical evidence of Woolf’s knowledge of both cinema and psychoanalysis – ‘Woolf recorded in her diary that she was “gulping up Freud”, she wrote, in a study of Between the Acts’.Footnote1 But Laura’s reading goes beyond evidence into a new kind of critical analysis, a new kind of critical inwardness, that understands film and psychoanalysis in the novels in a structural and formative way and that thus explores otherwise inaccessible aspects of Woolf’s writing. It was not a case of thematics, of matching the novels against text and film so much as an imaginative understanding of the way forms and ideas penetrate to the organisation and imaginative shaping of the novels. Laura had an intuitive understanding of Woolf’s imagination, catching, as well as Woolf’s intensity, the note of threnody that sounds in so much of the writing.
Woolf in the work
Laura’s Virginia Woolf for the British Council’s ‘Writers and their Work’ series, published in 1997, went into a second edition in 2004. In it she pays particular tribute to Hermione Lee’s The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977), to Rachel Bowlby’s Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (1988), and to Gillian Beer’s The Common Ground (1996).Footnote2 (Though her list of critical studies is generous and informative, running to over sixty entries.) This is her most comprehensive work on Woolf, moving steadily through the oeuvre from the early novels, The Voyage Out (1908 but published in 1915), and Night and Day (1919) to the last, the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941). Laura made prolific use of the letters, diaries and essays. This study is still one of the most thorough and complete accounts of Woolf in existence.
But this is not the first time Woolf enters Laura’s work: references to Woolf and particularly to her views on biography occur frequently in her first major book – Auto/biographical Discourses. Criticism Theory Practice, published by Manchester University Press in 1994. The ‘New Biography’ set afloat by Lytton Strachey was the focus of Woolf’s guarded mix of interest and disagreement (see Chapter 3). There is a bravura account of Orlando (pp. 116–27) as a transgressive flouting of genre, and a reading of Orlando and ‘his’ nakedness through a quizzical understanding of ‘the metaphysical concept of truth as aletheia, the unveiled, the ‘not-concealed’ (p. 122), first explored by Nietzsche. The place of the gendered body in autobiography and the question of exposure and ‘indecency’ in the genre are issues generated by Woolf’s satire.
A whole chapter on Woolf, ‘The Shadow on the Screen: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema’ (pp. 99–178), is devoted to Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Years, in Laura’s prize-winning study, The Tenth Muse. Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007), published by Oxford University Press. (This study won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell prize in 2008.) Subsequently, in Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014), published by Cambridge University Press, two essays on Woolf were included: ‘“In the Circle of the Lens”. Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-Making and Memory’ (pp. 221–37) and ‘Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel’ (pp. 238–56). She published no fewer than twelve articles on Woolf over her career in addition to the critical material in books. In this list I have only included those pieces that overtly reference Woolf. It is clear that themed articles on modernism, on film, on the novel, on autobiography, and on cinema include Woolf in the rubric. Here are the twelve – I have not consigned them to a footnote. I want to demonstrate how wide and deep Laura’s commitment to Woolf was. From publishing history to feminism, from translation to consciousness and memory, from the Bloomsbury Group aesthetics to the short story, the range of these studies is huge.
‘Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’, in W. Chernaik, W. Gould, and I Wilson (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 124–50; ‘“In the Circle of the Lens”: Virginia Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-Making and Memory’, Journal of the Short Story in English (Spring, 2008), pp. 153–69. ‘Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf’, in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 142–79; ‘Introduction’, Translations from Russian by Virginia Woolf and S.S. Koteliansky (Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006); ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press’, in Maggie Humm (ed.), Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 263–97; ‘Virginia Woolf’s Adventures in Consciousness’, in Alexis Gohmann and Caragh Wells (eds), Digressions in European Literature from Cervantes to Sebald (Palgrave: London, 2011), pp. 118–29; ‘Virginia Woolf: Re-Forming the Novel’, in Michael Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 378–93; ‘Bloomsbury Aesthetics’, in Victoria Rosner (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 162–82; ‘Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel’, in Claire Davison, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Basio (eds), A Contemporary Woolf, Collection Present Perfect (Montpelier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2014); ‘Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories’, in Jessica Berman (ed.), A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2016), pp. 27–40; ‘Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.), Cambridge History of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 713–17; ‘“Some Ancestral Dread”: Woolf, Autobiography and the Question of “Shame”’, in Jane de Gay, Anne Reus, and Tom Brecking (eds), Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2017), pp. 264–79.
And this is not the end: there is a glorious account of The Waves in her magisterial study, posthumously published by Oxford University Press, Rhythm: The Measures of the Modern.
I have selected, to discuss at more length, the psychoanalytic and cinematic material in Virginia Woolf, the work on the novels in The Tenth Muse, and the discussion of The Waves. Here Laura takes Virginia Woolf studies into new realms of imagination.
Woolf: illuminations
While many critics see Woolf’s two early novels as a false start, a struggle with the terms of the ‘realist’ novel from which she was later to be liberated, Laura takes the claims of these novels seriously as experiments in the book of 1997, Virginia Woolf. She reads the second novel in particular, The Voyage Out, as an early struggle with consciousnesss’s ‘continual alteration in stature and significance’ (p.15). To understand Rachel’s subjectivity at the end of the novel she invokes both cinema and psychoanalysis in a way that dramatically deepens Rachel’s confused sense of perspective and the dislocation of selfhood and its violence. ‘For Rachel, consciousness entails a perpetual shift between, in cinematic terms, close-up and long shot … the self is subject to continual alteration in stature and significance, at times occupying the whole “glass” screen, or foreground, at others retreating and diminishing as time and history, which have preceded and will succeed the self, place it in “perspective”’ (p. 15). These perspectival changes climax at the end of the novel, as the ‘two great heads, the heads of man and woman, of Terence and Helen’, ‘loomed’ over Rachel as she lies on the ground. They are then incorporated into another discourse, psychoanalysis, as the ‘disordering of sexual and familial relationships’ (p. 15) returns Rachel to ‘(and buries her beneath) the imaginary space of maternal plenitude, a time before separation and loss’ (p. 16) and to a mythic matriarchal society.
Here Laura is not simply re-describing selfhood in alternative terms but using both discourses to give shape and meaning to psychic conditions that cannot be easily named or understood. Time and space, cinematic and psychoanalytical, reimagine Rachel’s experience and give its incoherence a way of being acknowledged.
It's as if, ten years before the book on cinema of 2007, and at the very beginning of her book on Woolf, Laura is declaring herself and affirming her critical procedures. Certainly her study of Woolf is saturated in the language of cinema and psychoanalysis as mutually sustaining discourses that provide new opportunities for exploring narrative. The chapters that include discussions of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, ‘Writing the City’ and ‘The Novel as Elegy’ and the final chapter on Between the Acts, are examples.
For Laura Woolf’s narrative revolution, that entailed ‘writing beyond the ending’ (p. 39) and her dissolution of conventional constructions of ‘character’ in the novel, entailed a new form. This necessarily arose from the modern city and ‘the life of the streets’ (p. 49). In Mrs Dalloway, we are shown how the trajectories of the modern city determine the trajectories of the narrative as Clarissa Dalloway shops in Bond Street, Peter Walsh follows an alluring woman, as Septimus Smith wanders. It is a narrative of gaps and disconnection, the narrative of the flaneur. Woolf thought of these as a succession of visual ‘scenes’ or ‘scene-making’(p. 63). These are explicitly ‘cinematic qualities’ (p. 66). Woolf thinks of consciousness as ‘an enormous eye’ (p. 65), a kind of camera. But the city organises consciousness and states of mind as well as vision. There is a connection between ‘walking, thinking, and daydreaming’ (p. 63). The enormous eye leads to what Woolf called ‘the duskier chamber of being’ (p. 65). So consciousness and the urban trajectory are linked. The city and identity become part of one another. The arbitrary and the violent, the city’s shocks and derelictions cannot be excluded. The city creates an intensely optical psyche as the eye and the mind negotiate a new identity that dissolves the Cartesian self and ‘think’ the self rather than conceding to the dominating ego that thinks and therefore is (p. 49).
It is not until Laura has established the complexity and intensity of the new identity of modernity and the structural, formative presence of the uncanny cinematic city in Woolf’s work that she explicitly invokes her twin cinematic and psychoanalytical paradigms. She moves to explicit theory only when she has established the novel’s narrative flow and its complexity.
Freud’s uncanny is the model of city experience and city identity. Writing of the ‘homelessness’ invoked in ‘Street Haunting’, an essay that works in parallel with Mrs Dalloway, she emphasises that ‘Homelessness is a key concept, which could be rethought in this context as ‘unhomeliness’ or the ‘unhomely’, a literal translation of the German word for ‘uncanny’, Freud’s Das Unheimliche. The uncanny, as Walter `Benjamin noted, was born out of the rise of great cities, in which human beings are strangers to each other and to themselves [and where] ghostly’ encounters with split-off parts of the self’ occur (p. 67). She goes on to say that the one-day ‘city’ novel of the metropolis in modernist works have their parallel in avant garde ‘day-in-the-life-of -the- city’ films, for instance by Walter Ruttmann (1927) and Dziga Vertov (1928). These provide for the novelist a whole series of new devices – ‘flashbacks, montage, tracking shots’ (p. 68).
Above all, though this essay is mentioned only later in the following chapter on ‘The novel as Elegy’(p. 86),it is surely Freud’s essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that is a presence in this chapter. The continual repercussions of the First World War as Septimus struggles with shell shock and loss, and the death of young men, we hear, who are still mourned, dominates the lives of so many characters.
Laura shows that To the Lighthouse is an intensely scopic novel: ‘The novel is above all about looking, perspective, distance, its organisation an extraordinarily complex interplay of eyelines and sight lines’ (p. 99) in which characters mirror each other. But the virtuosity of the novel is to think of the world without the organising presence of the human subject, to theorise absence. It is in the central passage of absence, ‘Time Passes’, the world ‘when you are not there’, a state on which Lily Briscoe is lectured when she tries to understand Mr Ramsay’s Humean research, that cinema becomes the organising narrative mode. The house decays without a human presence. Laura notes the similarity of imagery here to that in Woolf’s essay, ‘The Cinema’. The erect hare, the falling wave, the boat rocking, are the quintessence of early cinematic images and parallels to them reappear in ‘Time Passes’. The non-human cinematic eye replaces the human eye. In ‘Time Passes’, Laura argues, ‘Woolf produces a form of experimental cineplay, using visual images to express emotions and animating objects into non-human life’ (p.103). Mrs Ramsay’s folded shawl, swinging to and fro, is a supremely cinematic image. The arena of the non-human is here the arena of cinema.
The last part of the novel is organised narratologically for Laura on the psychoanalytic principle of splitting and ambivalence: Lily feels ‘two opposite things at the same time’ (p.109); James sees the lighthouse as both mother and father symbol (p. 114). When she moves to Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, ambivalence is the governing principle. As mirrors are turned upon the audience and radically fragment the onlookers it seems as if the visual image has its limits. But ambivalence is a principle that can explore human complexity and destruction. By this time Woolf had read widely in Freud’s work – the Hogarth Press was to publish James Strachey’s edition of Freud’s works over 1953–74. But Woolf was already, as Laura shows, an avid reader of psychoanalysis: The Hogarth Press had published Melanie Klein’s Love, Hate and Reparation in 1937 and Freud’s Civilisation, War and Death in 1939. Fascinatingly ambivalence is still tied to imagery, to cinematic experience, despite the limits of the visual. James sees the lighthouse as two antithetical images, Lily struggles with the visual to arrive at her vision, cutting her picture in two with a final stroke.
By the time she had completed this book, Laura had evolved her unique way of exploring the potential of the double epistemology of film and psychoanalysis. I see the rest of her work as a refinement of and deepening of this critical practice. The essays selected for her collection, Dreams of Modernity (2014) show an ever increasing sophistication and theoretical commitment to the coupling of film and psychoanalysis. Exemplary is ‘In the circle of the lens’, which traces through many drafts the evolution of what she terms ‘Woolf’s telescope story’, a tale in which a telescope inadvertently picks up an image of a man and a woman kissing, a virtual close-up. The telescope becomes an analogue of the screen image and Laura sees this through Woolf’s creative tendency of ‘scene-making’. Distance and proximity, and cinema’s capacity to alter space and size, are tied up with Woolf’s exploration of the deepest experiences of childhood and family. It’s an essay in which not only the techniques of film are explored but also the energies of memory, conjuring the mother, fuse with cinema’s image-making procedures.
Perhaps the most significant essay, from the point of view of Laura’s deep preoccupation with cinema and psychoanalysis, is ‘Dreaming and Cinematographic consciousness’ (pp. 178–200). Originating in 2001, a few years after her book on Woolf, it seems that Laura specially re-worked this essay, for Dreams of Modernity, an indication of its significance for her. The essay turns on Freud’s persistent silence on cinema despite a pervasive culture in which psychoanalysis and film were consistently linked. Laura begins this essay with the historical convergence of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology (the precursor of The Interpretation of Dreams) and the Lumière brothers’ first public presentation of the film of their workers leaving their factory, in 1895. She traces the many forms in which the film-dream linkage occurred, as cinema became understood as a ‘dream factory (p. 179). Henri Bergson, Havelock Ellis, Lou Andreas Salomé, Hans Sachs, Otto Rank, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Bertram Lewin, and Freud’s own analysand, H.D., all explore the alliance of film and psychoanalysis in different and subtle ways. But Laura is interested in Freud’s seemingly deliberate withholding of a commitment to cinema. She explores the famous essay on the uncanny as an example, where cinematic reference is explicitly avoided, despite its filmic possibilities. Walter Benjamin’s belief that film trains the spectator in the capitalist psyche of modernity is one possible explanation of Freud’s reticence. But she makes clear that at its deepest level Freud’s work actually endowed thinkers with a structural reading of film that went beyond the dream factory. His understanding of the work of projection (p. 188), for instance, and exploration of borderline states between sleep and waking, lowered consciousness and non-rational modes of creativity (pp. 189–90), taken up by Christian Metz and H. D., opened a discourse for cinema that was searching and profound. Laura leaves open the question of what came first, cinema’s aesthetic or Freud’s analysis. But there is no doubt that Freud’s understanding of psychic experience is a formative discourse for film.
To turn to The Tenth Muse of 2007, is to encounter a truly major labour of research and analysis. There is an 80 page chapter on ‘Virginia Woolf and Cinema’ (pp. 98–178) that explores the aesthetic of film we have seen in earlier work but with far greater contextual and theoretical detail. From Winifred Holtby to Erwin Panovsky, from the Bloomsbury Group’s commitment to cinema to the poetics of Charles Davy, the depth and reach of the discussion is extraordinary.
For Laura The Years (1937) is the exemplary novel of this chapter. One of the least discussed of the novels becomes for her a central text by virtue of its implicit understanding of the advent of sound in cinema and the repercussions of disarticulating sound and vision, of attending to the separate modalities of eye and ear. It is in the urban environment that this split is most evident. The Years adopts the trope of city films, when the environment dissolves into fragments of waste paper and garbage blown by an arbitrary wind. Sight is separated from sound. Not only are the technologies of sound overdetermined in the cityscape – the radio, the wireless, the telephone, the loudspeaker, the voice itself – but other kinds of parallel splittings take place. The presence of objects outside human agency (Laura instances the recurrent crimson chair) are detached from the moments of human observation. The abysses that create light and darkness, camera stills and movements, montage and close up, make this novel an apotheosis of fragments. Ending her chapter by quoting Charles Davy’s reading of film as poetry (rather than mimetic images) she assimilates film to language rather than vision. Its form, and that of The Years, is the breakup of pattern, the part object, incompleteness and the breaking off of the sentence figured as apostiopesis. The ellipsis of the camera makes the appropriate tense of the novel not the past tense but the gerundial infinitive, the grammar of stasis and paradoxical motion. Laura speaks of the dynamization of space and the spatialisation of time.
She sees this novel as a refinement of The Waves rather than the seeming failed return to the nineteenth-century ‘family’ novel that it is often thought to be. Notably absent in this chapter is the psychoanalytical reference. Clearly Laura was already turning to the dynamics of rhythm. Yet I think that the preoccupations of the earlier work are still there. Freud’s reading of projection, altered states, splitting, part objects, are more than subliminal points of reference in this chapter.
In Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, The Waves (1931), is a dominant text. Of course, rather than the model of film, the physics of the wave is a paradigm throughout this book. So is the perpetual present participle waves inhabit. One of the most virtuosic sections of the book is Laura’s account of The Waves (including the MS of the novel) in the final part of Chapter 5. Several kinds of rhythm come together. Roger Fry’s interest in calligraphy and handwriting as an aesthetic of bodily and mental rhythm appears through Bernard’s consciousness. His inauthentic response to rhythm through a narcissistic concern with calligraphy, the Byronic gestures that arrive via a colonial reading of ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold’, is marked off from the Dionysian rhythms of the city, just as these are marked off from the mechanical opening and shutting of doors experienced by Louis. Laura re-reads The Waves through rhythm in ways that make us reimagine the novel. It was a gift she had throughout her life, the critic’s ability to make us re-imagine.
It might seem that psychoanalytical readings are in abeyance in this book, but I don’t think so. They are so deeply assimilated that they need no discussion. Projection and splitting are the very principles on which The Waves is founded. The disavowals Laura traces in Bernard, for instance, are the mark of projection. Percival, representing something different for each character, epitomises the process of splitting. By the time she came to think of The Waves in terms of rhythm, Laura did not need these as explicit terms.
Nevertheless, if cinema is the tenth muse for Laura, psychoanalysis is the eleventh muse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Virginia Woolf (1997), British Council Writers and their Work, 2nd ed. (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2004), p. 182.
2 Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977); Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Gillian Beer, The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).