ABSTRACT
My contribution is a meditation on Laura Marcus's reflections on light – its rhythms and effects – that draws on insights from Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, especially the ‘Time Passes’ interlude in To the Lighthouse. The essay notes in particular Marcus's extraordinary capacity to read light equally in literary writing as in film.
1.
I remember the light that beautiful late September afternoon in 2021. The rays of the setting sun lay horizontally across the Thames flood plain as my son and I drove home from Bampton. We drove over the rainbow bridge before Faringdon and then, turning left, passed the turn-off to Frilford and Marsden, ascended Cumnor Hill and skirted the Wytham Woods ridge, swooping back down onto the flood plain, into Oxford.
As we drove, we noticed the extraordinary effect of the sunlight. It was soaking into the honeyed Cotswold stone of the houses and churches with their surrounding grave stones and walls till the stones seemed to glow with their own radiance.
The stones made me think of Katherine Mansfield. The saturated effect that level angles of afternoon sunlight produce was once memorably described by the New Zealand writer as generating ‘a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow’. It is a light, she further said, that draws out from objects a ‘colour … so intense’ that it can project onto skin and hair, bathing us in its reflected light.Footnote1
Squinting into that deep golden light as we drove, I thought about Laura. I thought about the light that had earlier played across Laura’s garden. I thought about the patches of brightness that had darted across the profusion of flowers in the flower-bed close to the garden door, the pink, yellow, purple, and crimson patches moving gently in the light wind. I thought that Laura, had she been able to join us, would have noticed and enjoyed these effects.
Later, back home, I thought about calling her, though it was no longer possible to do so. I would have liked to call to tell her more about this light, about how, after parking the car, and putting down my bag, feeling suddenly so tired, so desolate, I had walked out into my own garden and noticed how the setting sun had warmed the rich late summer green of the grass and shrubs here, too.
Standing there in the garden, I thought about sundials. And I thought about shadows. I thought how curious it is that something as seemingly constant in its rhythms as sunshine, can become a measure of the linear passing of time. I also thought about John Keats (as one does, I heard Laura’s voice saying). Something about the golden light and the level Thames floodplain reminded me of Keats, his perceptions of early autumn light. I remembered that Keats wrote ‘Ode to Autumn’ about just such a sun-drenched autumn day of ‘mellow fruitfulness’, on or around that same September date, in Oxfordshire of all places, near Port Meadow, beside the Thames.
2.
I remember the bright dewy morning of that same late September day. It was around ten o’clock and I was due to submit my chair of judges’ report on the Katherine Mansfield Society 2021 Essay Prize competition. The theme of the competition was ‘Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories’. First, I gave a summary assessment of the three shortlisted entries, and then a short account of why we had chosen the winner. The deadline was noon.
The judges, Jay Dickson, Claire Drewery, and I, were from different universities and different countries, but, by strange coincidence, the winning essay we had chosen that morning, entitled ‘Redefining “Photographic Realism” in the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield’, several times referenced Laura’s work on modernist rhythm. More than that, it seemed at certain points to be in dialogue with Laura’s thinking on photography and film, on light effects and the movement of light. Writing the report, I compared the winning essay’s startling insights to the flashing of a spinning zoetrope. Like this optical toy, the essay kept ‘revealing new perspectives and angles’ on Mansfield’s contribution to modernist representation.
We judges could not have known this at the time, as the essays were anonymised. But it turned out that the winning essay that we had selected on that 22 September had been written by someone who had been Laura’s student, Daisy Birch.Footnote2 She had clearly found in Laura’s work, and imbibed from it, a sensitivity to the meanings of light, always restless, even when it appears still.
That reciprocity, that back and forth between two readers, a teacher and a student, recorded whether inadvertently or not something that in retrospect became vital to my memory of that September day. An honouring of Laura’s insights not only as a teacher and conversationalist, but also as a writer and a reader, as a reader of light as it moves.
Close to noon, I finished writing my report. I clicked send and leaned back. Stimulated by my reading of the essay, my eye was caught by the patches of warm sunlight on the wall opposite. I noticed that the patches kept shifting and moving, back and forth, as if something (moving leaves, the breeze, what Virginia Woolf called ‘little airs’ ‘detached from the body of the wind’) were bumping them along.Footnote3
3.
I remember how much Laura admired the ‘Time Passes’ interlude in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – with its evocation of those ‘little airs’ nosing their way through the vacated house. New College filmed her reading ‘Time Passes’ during the Covid lockdown in 2020. And, by coincidence, two of us elected to read critical passages by Laura discussing the interlude at her online memorial.Footnote4
Light insinuates itself throughout ‘Time Passes’, and, as such, it marks the unmarked and unremarked flow of time:
So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy.Footnote5
I notice also how the ‘little airs’, perhaps draughts, perhaps breezes, perhaps something songlike, musical, are urged on by the light, how they are at once perishing, yet steadfast, or steadfast, yet perishing. And I see more clearly than before how, in the passage, time is a condition of light. The shift of light across a day, repeated every day, brings a gradual blurring of edges, a fading of distinctness. It registers the passing of time.
But I also notice, now, something else: I see that the light-infused interlude actually begins, shockingly, in darkness; in fact, in a ‘profusion of darkness’. The ‘lamps [are] all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain [is] drumming on the roof’. The deserted St Ives house is engulfed in a downpour of darkness that drowns out contour, detail, volume, edges.
Against the darkness, there is one countervailing presence, the stroke of the lighthouse light upon the stair. A light that is rhythmic. And a rhythm that brings light.
And so it figures, as I know Laura saw, that the words ‘rhythm’ and ‘rhythmically’ in To the Lighthouse are most often associated either with Mrs Ramsay, or with Lily Briscoe, both characters who are creators of works that arrest time, be it a special meal, or a painting. Lily Briscoe, in particular, crafts in colour, works with rhythms of light. While painting, Lily finally attains with her running, flickering marks on the canvas a kind of ‘dancing rhythmical movement’. Or, as Woolf writes it, it is as if ‘the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related.’Footnote6
4.
I remember when, in the spring of 2014, Laura and I co-taught a Master’s course on late twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction. ‘Contemporary Fiction: History, memory and time’, was the full title. The seminars explored developments in contemporary Anglophone fiction though the lens of topics like ‘experiments with time’, ‘narrative, chance and contingency’, and ‘questions of memory and memoir’. The set texts included work by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, W.G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith.
I remember the considerate way in which Laura taught the course, how keen she was to share her questions about contemporary fiction and time with the students. I remember in particular the number of times in class that she paused on the question of time flow in narrative. There was the stream of consciousness, yes, she said, but there was also the broader, more encompassing issue of how the flow of narrative captures temporality, or our perceptions of temporality; and of how the sentence can compress, dilate and even suspend our experience of time.
Was it during these discussions that Laura first talked about her new or renewed interest in modernist rhythm? Recurrence, rhythm, repeat patterns, I seem to remember her saying – these make up the significant ways in which the temporal arts can arrest time, and turn it back on itself. Only a few years later she was exploring some of the further connotations of rhythm at the Paris Institute: how rhythm marked time, and yet, in turning back on itself, in making repeat patterns, created the moment in and out of time that is often considered quintessentially modernist.
Think again, I imagine Laura telling me, of the pale footfall of the lighthouse light on the stair in To the Lighthouse, the imprint that Woolf also calls its stroke. That is light marking time, holding it still, yet also turning it back upon itself
But remember, too, I imagine saying to Laura, that equivalent instance in Mansfield, of the clock ticking. As Laura knew, when it came to talking about Woolf, I always tried to find some matching instance in Mansfield. There’s Mansfield’s story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, I say to Laura, remember that way in which the ‘soothing lilt, C'est ça, c'est ça’ of the clock marks the passing of time yet subtly arrests it, too. Like in ‘Time Passes’, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ reflects on the war and on time passing, and resonates with Woolf’s Interlude in unmistakeable ways:
And the years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over – there is no village outside at all – the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all – sit in an empty café and listen to the clock ticking until – Footnote7
5.
I remember that one of the aspects of Laura’s modernist expertise that always stood out for me was her power of critical discretion. In particular, she could keep the great women writers of this period – Woolf, Richardson, Stein, Townsend Warner, Mansfield, and, a little later, Rhys – together in her mind without conflating them, as can too often happen.
This was particularly pronounced in the case of Katherine Mansfield, who is often mistakenly seen as a minor modernist, yet whose formal models proved crucial to the more academically-accepted figure of Virginia Woolf, especially of how to do stream-of-consciousness. Laura, by contrast, had regard for Katherine Mansfield’s gifts – in particular (of course) for her ‘eternal quest for rhythm’, that Mansfield also called the ‘splendid adventure’, and for her innate sense of rhythm’s importance to modernist innovation.Footnote8
In her posthumous book, Rhythmical Subjects, in chapter 4 ‘Rhythm and the Rhythmists’, Laura weighs Mansfield’s contribution to the arts of her time, the 1910s, in considerable, far-reaching detail, focussed on that indefinable yet essential quality of rhythm. The chapter was based on her 2015 Birthday lecture to the Katherine Mansfield Society.Footnote9
In the essay, Laura discusses how the modernist small magazine Rhythm accented this titular quality not only in its title but also as its guiding principle. The journal was founded in 1911 by Mansfield’s partner John Middleton Murray, and Mansfield soon stepped into the roles of Assistant Editor and regular contributor. She wrote under several different nom-de-plumes, using her editorials and other articles to acknowledge the importance of rhythm not only to the visual arts, as in the work of the Scottish colourist J. D. Fergusson, but also to the temporal.
As Laura observes in the chapter, rhythm as a term was confounding to the writers of and after 1910: it seemed indefinable, and yet, at the same time, because it had been set up as a principle of modernist artistic creation, it demanded to be used with precision. In their polemical article for Rhythm, aptly entitled, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, a key text for Laura’s Rhythm project, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield addressed the matter directly. They acknowledged the impossibility of fixing on a term that nonetheless ‘ran throughout [their journal’s] formation and its contents’.Footnote10 For Mansfield, who was an accomplished cellist, the idea of rhythm would also have had important musical and auditory underpinnings, which we can hear in how she puts together her sentences.
Laura was so clear on Mansfield’s importance as a modernist, I would venture to say, exactly because the New Zealander helped to raise her awareness of rhythm. But Mansfield also thought in terms of moving light, or moving pictures, and so, I suspect, further recommended herself to the author of The Tenth Muse. Mansfield’s imagination was often filmic, as Claire Hanson writes: she thought about ‘the tracking shots that the new art of cinema hadn’t yet invented’.Footnote11 In fact, Mansfield, I often like to think, helped to show Laura how an artist might render the movement of light in prose, and the movement of time in rhythmical syntax.
6.
I remember visits to the Picasso Museum in Malaga, that I seek out with my family nearly every summer, and visited as normal in August 2021, too, a month earlier than my late afternoon drive. Each summer, the museum hosts a temporary exhibition alongside its standing exhibition of eight rooms of paintings by Pablo Picasso, covering his entire career. In 2021, the temporary exhibition featured sculptures by Miquel Barceló, entitled Metamorphosis, referencing Franz Kafka’s 1915 story. Though many of Barceló’s figures were arresting and memorable, in 2021 it was the work in the standing collection that stayed with me. Now, my response to these works forms my most vivid memory of our visit that year.
In particular, I remember the work in the final room of the standing collection which covers the last few years of Picasso’s ceaselessly productive life. These works are not among my favourites but they are unforgettable. They include the pictures the artist learned to paint, as he himself said, after a lifetime of trying to paint like a child, having started out as a young artist ‘drawing like Raphael’.
For me, there is too much happening in these paintings but not that much of it is interesting, at least by comparison to the earlier work. There is too much unforced detail. There are clown figures and child figures, some of them grotesque. Surfaces are flat. Colour is no longer as vibrant as in the Cubist period or his 1930s paintings. Outlines here are dark, reinforced in dotted lines. We miss the younger Picasso’s broken perspectives. We miss his humour and daring.
With relief we turn or return to earlier rooms but it is impossible to forget what we saw, those slashed black outlines, the anger they express, the rage against extinction that they embody. They leave a kind of mark on the retina, not an afterglow but an after-blot, a shadow that is erased only by something as blue, early and wonderful as the 1914 small painting ‘Copa’ or ‘Glass’, for example, in one of the first rooms. This oil on cardboard vibrates with the rhythm that so fascinated Laura, and that Picasso intuited from early on, when he tried to resist painting like Raphael.
In the painting, the virtual circle of the glass rim repeats, if slightly enlarged, the circle of the glass base, and both are echoed in the double circles of the lemon slices or olives held suspended in the drink or balanced on the rim. The three or four circles seem to be on the same plane, they resonate back and forth. Perspective here has given way to a scaffolding of lines and planes. On one of these planes the circles of rim and base ring together in chorus. We can imagine that one sounds, and then the other, as its echo and companion. And so on, back and forth.
The composition of ‘Copa’ is bathed in grey-blue light, the pale afternoon light that we also find in those quiet incidental paintings of the first Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh from some twenty years earlier. We’ve all seen them at some point, a café table with absinthe glasses, or a restaurant interior with laid tables, each with its posy of late summer flowers. In these paintings, the light is once again still, full and pale blue, the somnolent light of mid-afternoon. Everyone is away, perhaps asleep, daydreaming, dozing. It will be a while, an hour, more, before they filter back in. And yet, though the moment is so still, so arrested, time is relentlessly drifting by, paling into the later afternoon. A cat with a raised tail drifts past the glass window. The light shifts. A petal drops, or has already dropped, onto the tablecloth, the dust settles gently, imperceptibly on the surface of the absinthe.
7.
And I remember Laura’s phrase ‘yes, really’. Whenever she used it, she meant it. It was such a firm, certain phrase for someone who worked on perceptual uncertainty. But it was also an appropriate phrase for a scholar who reflected at such length on realism and the composition of the real in literature.
‘Yes, really’. There was never any doubt that she meant it. She gave advice generously and freely, her head to one side in that way she had. She often encouraged you to believe in yourself more, to go ahead, yes, really, and do that thing you were hoping to do, though be careful about rushing in headlong, she also cautioned.
But you might still wonder, and have qualms, you might seek further confirmation, more clarity. Generous advice and support like Laura’s, in an academic context, is relatively rare. So you sought it again, you wanted to make sure. Yet, every time, she came back firmly with those words, Yes, really. That really is the case. It’s real to you, so take it as real. Yes, really, I liked that book of yours so much, I leant it to my neighbour. I’ll examine that student of yours, yes, really, it sounds like a great thesis. Yes, really, truly, I went to the garden centre on my birthday, it’s truly one of my favourite places to go. We were spoiled for choice and bought far too many plants, too many pots, too much compost. And then, after a pause, But you can never have too many plants.
How glad I am that she did buy all those flowers, those seedlings, those pots. I can see them now, once again, in Laura’s garden, the hollyhocks, the sweet peas, the daisies, the delphiniums, their purples and crimsons, plants that had been tended by Laura across the spring, and into the early summer, now catching the mellow light of the late afternoon September sun.
8.
I remember Laura. I remember and re-remember Laura. Laura and her light.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 278; Claire Harman, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (London: Chatto and Windus, 2023), pp. 4–5, 8; Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), p. 161.
2 See Daisy Birch, ‘Redefining “Photographic Realism” in the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield’, in Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin (eds), Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
3 Virginia Woolf, ‘Time Passes’, To the Lighthouse (1927; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 138.
4 See Laura Marcus, ‘Literature and Cinema’, in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 335–58.
5 Woolf, ‘Time Passes’, To the Lighthouse, p. 138.
6 Woolf, ‘The Lighthouse’, To the Lighthouse, p. 172.
7 Harman, All Sorts of Lives, p. 114, 137.
8 Ibid., pp. 80–1.
9 Laura Marcus, ‘Rhythm and the Rhythmists’, in Isobel Armstrong, Josephine McDonagh, William Outhwaite, Helen Small (ed), Rhythmical Subjects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), ch. 4.
10 Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects, ch. 4.
11 Harman, All Sorts of Lives, p. 109.