Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime

The Invisible Tribunal

Daniel T. O'Hara

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349995882, 9781137590596
• eBook ISBN: 9781137580061
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Sublime Woolf was written in a burst of enthusiasm after the author, Daniel T. O'Hara was finally able to teach Virginia Woolf's modernist classics again. This book focuses on those uncanny visionary passages when in elaborating 'a moment of being, ' as Woolf terms it, supplements creatively the imaginative resonance of the scene.

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Like Giving Birth to a Dead White Star: An Introduction to the Modern Sublime in Virginia Woolf

Abstract: By way of a close reading of “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’” O’Hara explicates his theory of the modernist sublime as it relates to Woolf. Through an act of identification and doubling that occurs between Woolf and previous thinkers, and then again between author and reader, the modernist sublime is characterized as the apparent paradox that results from the fusion of irony and the sublime within the imagination. O’Hara calls first on Pater’s definition of romanticism as beauty imbued with strangeness to set up a discussion of Freud’s uncanny, a self-preserving doubling. Woolf’s work demonstrates a modernist sublime that takes the form of, at once, pure receptivity and pure power as the outcome of an uncanny identification between author and reader.

O’Hara, Daniel T. Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137580061.0004.

The conclusion of “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ ” resonates with an ambiguous note for its first readers: Is this really a lesbian tale?, the sharpest of them are likely to have wondered. The story emerges, Woolf notes in her Diary for 5 September 1926 as she is working on To the Lighthouse (1927), and appears in Forum, a New York journal, in January 1928. “[A]s usual, side stories are sprouting in great variety as I wind this [novel] up: a book of characters; the whole string being pulled out from some simple sentence, like Clara Pater’s, ‘Don’t you find Barker’s pins have no points to them?’ ” ¹ (DIII, 106). Clara Pater is the sister of Walter Pater and one of Woolf’s Greek teachers.

What may make this story striking to readers even now, if not to the journal editor then, is its rather explicit “Sapphism,” as Woolf puts it in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, her lover at the time. “Sixty pounds just received from America for my little Sapphist story of which the Editor has not seen the point, though he’s been looking for it in the Adirondacks” (L III, 431). Whether in the journal version or in the slightly revised and published later A Haunted House (1944), portrays in the end a lesbian moment; this kiss, in fact, between Fanny Wilmot and Miss Craye, her piano teacher, is one of those sublime moments of being that punctuates Woolf’s texts, whatever their mode of sexuality:

She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star. Julia kissed her. Julia possessed her.

“Slater’s pins have no points,” Miss Craye said, laughing queerly and relaxing her arms, as Fanny Wilmot pinned the flower to her breast with trembling fingers. (220)

We will return to this final scene, and the immediate staging of it, but first I want to establish two points about this passage and then trace a brief history of the sublime in order to clarify my intentions in this book.

The two points are rather evident, and entwined, like the Sapphist figures of this story. They touch—kiss, if you will—yet are distinguishable. The simile “like a dead white star” is sublime and ironic at once. Every major theorist of the sublime has recourse to stellar imagery, among other familiar natural imagery of infinite magnitude or dynamic motion, as Kant would put it, when they want to exemplify it in its awesome impressiveness.² The star, however, is clearly here what is termed a “white dwarf.” So Julia Craye is ironically sublime, or sublimely ironical, or can we—can Woolf or Fanny—define the distinction with a significant enough difference? Can the critics, who claim such scenes for a female sublime or a lesbian sublime? Is not something we can call more generally modernist happening here? It is this apparently fused momentary at-once-ness of sublimity and irony, however, which does define, as this book will demonstrate by reading Woolf’s most experimental major texts, the modern sublime at work. I prefer to use the term “modern sublime,” rather than “modernist sublime,” because what I am pointing to, while it reaches a formal perfection in modernism, also appears earlier and later, within the broad scope of modernity.

The most important claims, for me, in Longinus’s On the Sublime are that “the true sublime” is “the echo of a great soul” (61) and that it uplifts the soul, which takes “proud flight,” “being filled with great joy and self-display, as though it had itself created what it has heard” (55).³ Of course, to have both these things be true, one must consider the sublime to be not an objective quality of terror in art or nature (Burke); nor a purely subjective operation (or perversely edifying failure to operate) of a mental faculty (Kant), the imagination and the understanding failing to accommodate the sublime sensation-seeking compensation in ideas of reason; nor a contingent self-canceling functioning of language (Lyotard); rather, it is the work of the reader or listener, the spectator, who projects his or her own receptivity (or “echoing”) into the visions of the creator and then assumes the position of, identifies with, the creator, in proud flight, hovering and soaring at will, spiraling and dipping, even plummeting and falling out of the sky. The key here is “at will.” At least, in its modern variation, where this apparent contradiction or paradox of both ironically being inspired and sublimely creative at once, in a perpetual dance of perspectives, breaks open and renews, as if in a ritual self-divination, the spontaneous power of the imagination to embrace the future via this act of identification, however alienated the reader or potentially alienating the circumstances. Woolf and her closest readers thereby determine their heroic fates together by submitting their mind to radical expansion and enlargement, if only momentarily, before moving on to more such experiences of reading.

Consider how the final two paragraphs are set up by Woolf. As Fanny Wilmot finds the pin at last on the floor where she has been on her knees looking for it, she looks up and surprises Miss Craye “in a moment of ecstasy” (220). Fanny realizes that her silent question of whether her piano instructor who plays Bach ravishingly was ever happy is yes, for a moment, in this moment at least and no doubt in others of her chosen (if once for Fanny also narrow-seeming) life:

She sat there, half turned away from the piano, with her hands clasped in her lap holding the carnation upright, while behind her was the sharp square of the window, uncurtained, purple in the evening, intensely purple after the brilliant electric lights which burnt unshaded in the bare music room. Julia Craye sitting hunched and compact in holding her flower seemed to emerge of the London night, seemed to fling it like a cloak behind her. It seemed in its bareness and intensity the effluence of her spirit, something she had made which surrounded her, which was her. Fanny stared. (220)

Though a rose at the opening of the story, the flower ends here as this carnation, which I assume is white, even as one usually pictures a rose as red (of course, without any specification, either flower could be many other colors). But, as Longinus insists, with the sublime, we forgive minor imperfections, while with mere perfection we miss terribly the presence of the sublime. Similarly, as Derrida makes clear in The Truth in Painting, the sublime is not simply enhanced by the frame that would contain it, for as one etymology of the sublime has it, it is the frame—the door frame up high, over the threshold, the entrance way to the great house, the temple, the tomb, the gateway.

As Fanny stares, we envision her looking at Miss Craye, as Woolf must have envisioned her readers looking at her text and reading her revision of the sublime here. The expanse of this reflexive spiraling suggests the more sensible phenomena of the scene, as Fanny’s stare takes in the extensive temporal perspective of Julia’s life and its everyday incidents, her “habits” (219), the way one looks at a painting with retreating Renaissance perspective but taken to a higher power, as it were. Expanse and depth are both spread out across the passage that follows, at once:

All seemed transparent for a moment to the gaze of Fanny Wilmot, as if looking through Miss Craye, she saw the very fountain of her being spurt up in pure, silver drops. She saw back and back into the past behind her. She saw the green Roman vases stood in their cases; heard the choristers playing cricket; saw Julia quietly descend the curving steps on to the lawn; saw her pour out tea beneath the cedar tree; softly enclose the old man’s hand in hers; saw her going round and about the corridors of that ancient Cathedral dwelling place with towels in her hand to mark them; lamenting as she went the pettiness of daily life; and slowly ageing, and putting away clothes when summer came, because at her age they were too bright to wear and tending her father’s sickness; and cleaving her way ever more definitely as her will stiffened towards her solitary goal; travelling frugally; counting the cost and measuring out of her tight shut purse the sum needed for this journey, or for that old mirror; obstinately adhering whatever people might say in choosing her pleasures for herself. She saw Julia—(220; italics mine)

The pinning of the flower by Fanny onto Julia that follows confirms their multifaceted, sublime intimacy. They touch, they kiss, and presumably with Fanny rising into Julia’s opening arms. However, Julia is “like a dead white star,” a highly condensed stellar remnant as if she had imploded after most of the original star blew off. The nearest such white dwarf, first discovered in 1922, is Sirius B, companion to a larger star. Why does Fanny see her this way? Her vision of Julia definitively rejecting a belated older male suitor is entertained as a probable fancy but nothing more. And it is more comic than serious, as the imagined couple, rowing on the Serpentine, almost hit a bridge because the suitor is pleading his case against increasingly stiff odds and defensive reactions, until he gives up in maximum exasperation—to Julia’s “immense relief” (218). Irony, yes, but sublimity, too? The key to Julia’s sublimity for Fanny, despite her being, as if born a dead white star, is the previous passage in which Fanny envisions through the window framing Julia the London night as being flung like a cloak behind her: “It seemed in its bareness and intensity the effluence of her spirit, something she had made which surrounded her, which was her” (220). The spectral cloak as such effluence of her spirit against the darkening background of the London night, the carnation she holds and then has pinned to her, and the white star imagery—all combine and condense into the unspoken intimacy between the two women. The moment of being is that in which one’s very being is transparent to the sympathetic imaginative gaze of the other with whom one shares love, however fleetingly or lastingly. The image of “the very fountain” of this being, which “spurt[s] up in pure, silver drops,” is one that transcends, as it incorporates, all that need be said about its comprehensive sexual basis. “ ‘Slater’s pins may have no points,’ ” but Woolf’s “moments of being” do, and they are deliciously, sublimely ironic, as this phrase by its repetition becomes a refrain.

This point is driven home, as it were, by recalling how Woolf generally, as we will see in this book, in performing her sublime irony, her modern sublime, recreates a person, often a woman from the past, who is a writer, revising the figure’s words, rereading them, as she does here, when she has Fanny see (à la Proust), but even more so the multifold daily life of Julia. In fulfillment of what one critic has called Woolf’s “absent father,” Walter Pater’s diaphanous vision of a quickened and multiplied life of sensation, desire, and memory, Woolf grants Fanny an involuntary vision of Julia raising her to the heights of the sublime:

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly, Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. (125–126; italics mine)⁴

Woolf in her characteristically experimental works repeatedly gives birth, as here with Pater, to uncanny figures of the past, like dead white stars in some cases, as blazing supernovas in others.⁵ What is crucial in each case, however, is precisely how Woolf revises what she receives and transmits something both alike and other. Pater famously defines romanticism as strangeness added to beauty, and in “Moments of Being,” as we see, the strangeness of ordinary daily life, as in Wordsworth, and the beauty of the self-determining spinster who loves young women rather than men constitute her uncannily solitary independence. Whether this is a model divine or not for Fanny, it is, for the moment, one that Woolf embraces before she completes To the Lighthouse. Woolf does so because it enables her to manage the voices of her absent fathers (here Pater), those masters of the sublime beauty she would incorporate as here in revisionary figures all her own. This creative process of the modern sublime as Woolf handles it is my subject.

Freud, in The Uncanny (1919), provides us with an effective way to analyze what is going on when he shows how the uncanny experience arises from the insistent return of a disavowed memory of infantile or childhood helplessness and the phantasmatic defenses against such helplessness that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Like Giving Birth to a Dead White Star: An Introduction to the Modern Sublime in Virginia Woolf
• 2  Burning through Every Context: On Narrating the Modern Sublime in Jacobs Room
• 3  The Uncanny Muse of Creative Reading: On the New Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway
• 4  Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: To the Lighthouse
• 5  The Revisionary Muse in Virginia Woolfs On Being Ill: On Literary Politics, Modernist Style
• 6  Woolfs Unborn Selves in The Waves
• 7  The Self-Revising Muse: On the Spirit of the Unborn Creator in A Room of Ones Own
• Coda: Images of Voice and the Art of the Sublime
• Bibliography
• Index