Persnickety Preconceptions

I wasn't expecting to like Virginia Woolf. I had some preconceptions, I guess. I mean, she is British. And that can only lead to trouble. Or maybe that movie with Nicole Kidman rubbed me the wrong way. (I haven't actually seen anything but the opening scene, where Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, drowns herself in a river.) I don't know what my deal was, but as we readied ourselves to read eight of her essays in my English Prose Style class, I was setting myself up to not like her. I was prepared.

Wow, did I have my head up my ass.

Before I say any more, go here and read "Craftsmanship" (written in 1937, 2,900 words) and go here and read "Professions for Women" (written in 1931, 2,400 words). I'll wait.

For those of you too lazy to hit the jumps -- but really, especially if you've never read Virginia Woolf, spend 15 minutes of your day and read these pieces. Trust me on this one -- here are some excerpts from "Craftsmanship":

"No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room."

"Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still--do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught?"

"...words do not live in the dictionary, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order."

I mean honestly, the woman is writing an essay about words. Just words. Stylistically there is so much going on here; the repetition that suggests she's rewriting, clarifying her ideas as she goes ("if you could teach, if you could learn" could almost have a "nay," in between the clauses) -- this is the major stylistic element Woolf employs that we talked about in class. We see her thought process as she goes, and gimmicks aren't needed to add emphasis; it's almost, in a sense, pure. She also can never seem to find exactly the right word, so she uses a bunch of them along with some asyndeton to give us a fuller picture: "unlectured, uncriticized, untaught." (In other essays, "it creates; it adorns; it enhances" and "a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat." And so forth.) It's almost poetic, this apposition, this redefinition. Both of these stylistic techniques -- along with Woolf's characteristic interrupters and parenthetical asides -- have already made their way into my own writing, as evidenced by this very paragraph. It's amazing how quickly something like that clicks in the brain and adds itself to the standard cannon. It seems simple enough, but I'm continually surprised by how much you can learn about writing simply by reading a lot.

Plus, how could you not love a woman who makes a joke about a typewriter? That shit's hilarious.

And then there's the content of what she's saying -- that "words, English words" really do offer an infinite number of possibilities. The relative ease of the modern publishing process -- as opposed to 200 or 100 or even 50 years ago -- has created a completely different literary landscape. There's a lot of crap out there. And yet Woolf points out that it doesn't matter, because there is still so much greatness to come. Isn't that just a wonderful and refreshing idea? I'm going to get straight to work creating beautiful, never-before-seen prose!!

Or, you know, writing a blog post about not hating Virginia Woolf. I think we'd be friends. Maybe we'd like hang out and go to the movies and she'd be the kind of person who talks through the whole movie about all the elements they didn't consider when writing the script. Then I'd shush her and tell her that you know what, Sofia Coppola is doing the best she can, and anyway she's been nominated for an Oscar and so you should just calm down and enjoy the cinematic presentation. And then she'd sulk and be silent at dinner and she wouldn't call me. And then she'd drown herself in a river.

Wow, that hypothetical went downhill really quickly.