"One Thing Should Open Out Of Another"
Virginia Woolf’s Early Fiction & Her Radical Literary Agenda 

Addison Godel
Virginia Woolf And The Fabric of Things
Instructor: Dr. David Bradshaw
Worcester College, Oxford

Over the course of her early work, Virginia Woolf made a shift in her approach to writing so dramatic that it is sometimes hard to recognize her first and third novels as the work of the same artist.  Between Night and Day and Jacob’s Room, Woolf seemed to develop a incredible range of stylistic techniques – shifting perspectives, streams of consciousness, and so forth – that helped her achieve her goal of writing that reflected the real.  This transformation, which has been much discussed, is easier to understand if we avoid painting the novels on either side of the gulf as fundamentally different.  Despite Woolf’s almost self-deprecating comment that the innovations of her short stories came “all in a flash” or “in one second,” Woolf was from the very beginning twisting the forms she had chosen: there are radical elements within The Voyage Out, her first novel.  It is arguable that there are traditional elements within Jacob’s Room.  Examining these two novels, plus several of Woolf’s short stories from the same period, we may gain a less black-and-white understanding of the development of Woolf’s fiction.

Woolf was clearly dissatisfied from an early point with the preoccupation of conventional fiction with “big” things, “big” people, and “big” events.  Grand morality plays and tidy Dickensian story mechanics tend not to be accurate reflections of the real world; for Woolf, even James Joyce was too conventional because he put too much of himself into his fiction.  It was important to Woolf to break down the traditions that took fiction out of the realm of the real – plots that made events follow each other too seamlessly; characters that were made larger than life; dialogue, description, and internal monologue that revealed things in too orderly a fashion.  A passage late in Jacob’s Room illustrates:

Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side with fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps the living may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall.  Moreover, some were troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked the glass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow tomorrow; altogether they looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marble heads had dealt, with the course of history. (p. 241, Oxford World Classics edition)

Woolf plainly preferred vivid recreations of the people and rhythms of the law clerks to the phoney, constructed world of the marble heads – who of course in their time were surely as real, as “warts-and-all” as the men of the present day.  Her early work may be best understood as a series of attempts to capture this view of the world.

The Voyage Out, like its follower, Night and Day (which we won’t be discussing here), was pooh-poohed by Woolf later in her career.  It is indeed far more conventional than her later work, and it is not true that (as Michael Cunningham asserts in the introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition) “Woolf … did not attempt to enforce upon it any particular order or demand that it produce an order of its own.”  However, Woolf is, throughout the novel, working to sabotage the expectations placed on her boilerplate plot.  The book’s central themes and even central characters are difficult to isolate – gradually, in the absence of anyone else stepping up to the plate, the reader settles on Rachel Vinrace as the protagonist, with Helen Ambrose, Terence Hewet, and St. John Hirst as alternates.  It is difficult to pin down the lead characters because so many others are continuously intruding on their world, from the Dalloways to the various hotel guests.  Their strange and sometimes dramatic lives pop in when least needed; their plots often have nothing to do with the “main” characters, who sometimes seem to be quite annoyed or at least perplexed and useless in response to the intrusions (see Hewet and Rachel’s encounters with Evelyn Murgatroyd).  This barrage of other people’s problems and values, which appear in the lives of the characters but are never followed up on in a tidy fashion, is a clear attempt to mimic the way in which we encounter other people in real life.

Of course, The Voyage Out’s most obvious curiousity is the oft-noted fact that Rachel Vinrace, who is the protagonist (in the absence of any other character stepping up to the role), dies at the end of Chapter Twenty-Five.  As the book has a total of twenty-seven chapters, Rachel’s death is followed by a sort of coup of the supporting characters, who are in various ways affected by the death of Rachel but generally are continuing the rhythms of their lives.  While the death is a dramatic climax in the lives of many (such as Rachel’s betrothed, Hewet), it is not given an all-important resonance beyond what it “naturally” would have – or if it is, Woolf is restraining herself to some extent.  The other fascinating thing about Rachel’s death is the fact that it doesn’t grow out of the rest of the plot in any definable way.  In Dickens, the sickness would have been explicitly connected to some other event, something within the characters’ control, for maximum dramatic effect.  In Woolf, it seems possible that Rachel contracted her fatal illness on the jungle trip (which would be tragically ironic), but even the characters can’t agree on this explanation.  The only human figure specifically responsible for Rachel’s death is her incompetent first doctor, with no previous appearance in the novel and no discernable grudge against her.  Woolf is at war against her own novel – she refuses to let it hang together cleanly.

Of course, relatively speaking, it is quite conventional – and quite long.  It is sometimes hard to be certain whether it is indeed a conventional novel in the process of murdering its own genre, or just a poorly-written conventional novel.  Given Woolf’s track record, it seems fair to give her the benefit of the doubt.  But whatever its strengths, The Voyage Out suffers from being exceedingly long – close to four hundred pages is a lot of time and energy to expend on a literary experiment.  Perhaps sensing that her first novel (and her second, fitfully in progress) didn’t quite accomplish what she was going for, Woolf indulged in a number of short stories which allowed her to test out some new storytelling tools without having to put out so much sweat.  Several of these stories are of special interest to us, as they are plainly specific explorations of specific techniques which would emerge as central to the writing of Jacob’s Room and Woolf’s later work.

Take ‘The Mark on The Wall,’ for example.  This nearly plotless experiment depicts the stream of consciousness of a woman who sees a mark on the wall (surprise) and speculates as to what it might be.  These thoughts lead her into all sorts of elaborate musings on the nature of life, history and writing, “Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth.”  Her churning thoughts are frankly excessive by normal standards – the woman “grasps” at specific thoughts like “planks in the sea,” as if reflection on a spotty wall could be enough to reduce her to babbling mania if she does not keep herself in check (even though her command of language remains impeccable and clear).  While this makes the story a bit difficult to relate to, it is still an enchanting set of pages; the chain of thought is free-flowing but comprehensible – unlike in, say, Faulkner, we can understand how one musing leads into another.

‘Kew Gardens,’ quaintly cinematic, is the short story that most seems to inform the storytelling in Jacob’s Room.  It is a study in shifting perspectives – in the course of seven pages, we look over the figurative shoulders of eight people, a variety of flowers and other scenery, and one snail.  The device to accomplish this is, admittedly, a bit elementary – the story remains stationary at the position of the snail as various people pass by, touring Kew Gardens.  We enter their worlds only for the time that they remain essentially within the view of the snail.  But it is undeniably elegant the way in which Woolf slides from one player to the next by zooming back out to the adventures of the snail, whose slow contemplation of a dead leaf gives the story a recurring touchstone and narrative anchor.  Where ‘The Mark On The Wall’ gives us a single person’s thoughts spiralling off into countless directions, ‘Kew Gardens’ offers plausible pictures of countless people passing through a single place.

‘An Unwritten Novel’ plays, at a glance, like a less comical version of Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ which depicted a man constantly attempting to escape his real life and inevitable henpecking wife by launching into elaborate flights of self-congratulatory fancy.  In Woolf’s story, the tone is more reflective, as in ‘The Mark on the Wall.’  The narrator, on a train, exchanges brief words with a stranger, then proceeds to imagine all manner of dramatic explanations for the behavior of this woman (dubbed ‘Minnie’): she has a condescending sister-in-law, an unappreciative husband, or a Lady Macbeth-esque stain on her conscience.  These daydreams spiral off into more distant half-baked plots, most exotically one involving a troop of conquistadors being ambushed in the Andes by resourceful natives.  The narrator consciously hangs different story material on this stranger, with an eye to what will and won’t do in a story:

But his passion? Roses – and his wife a retired hospital nurse – interesting – for God’s sake let me have one woman with a name I like!  But no; she’s of the unborn children of the mind, illicit, none the less loved, like my rhododendrons.  How many die in every novel that’s written – the best, the dearest, while Moggridge lives.

Through this whole process, the narrator wills her quarry not to move or otherwise distract her from the elaborate internal monologues.  This relentless attachment to the creative process marks her as the novelist suggested by the story’s title, but her willingness to impose an order on events quite apart from what may be actually taking place marks her as a surrogate for Woolf herself, wrestling with fanciful dramatic excursions like The Voyage Out.  When at story’s end the fantasies are (naturally) revealed as false, the narrator feels profound disappointment (“Life’s bare as bone.”) which she promptly fills in with new stories based on the new information she’s gleaned about ‘Minnie.’

The most interesting thing about ‘An Unwritten Novel’ is its title.  We may read it as referring to the unwritten novel (or novels) being tossed around in the narrator’s head – however, it may prove far more interesting to consider the title as being descriptive of the work itself.  The story is being dubbed a novel that could have been, and Woolf is making an example: the elements within in these dozen pages – the train ride, the speculation, and what they come to – could fill a novel, and are certainly (in Woolf’s mind) more worthy of filling one than most of the contrived plots that the story’s narrator considers, or the voluminous myth-making of traditional novelists.  Despite her scepticism about such contrived plots, Woolf does not seem to be criticizing her speaker in ‘An Unwritten Novel’ the way she criticizes her contemporaries elsewhere.  Perhaps she sees something of herself in this daydreamer character; perhaps also she believes that idle imaginings and ruminations on a train ride belong to the category of the real – that is, while the contents of the unwritten novelist’s fantasies are absurdly melodramatic and disconnected from reality, the fact that she is having them is not.  Woolf sees narrative value in a bored woman on a train making up bad novels; as in ‘A Mark on the Wall,’ she is validating this character’s right to exist in legitimate fiction.

Finally, we come to Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third novel and her first to employ in full force the techniques she explored in the short fiction discussed above.  Placed in comparison with The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room does seem a radical departure and a clear testament to the evolution of Woolf as a writer.  If the protagonist in The Voyage Out was difficult to identify, the protagonist in Jacob’s Room is positively nonexistent.  There is no compelling reason to pay more attention to the titular Jacob than to anyone else, save for the fact that he is referred to (if indirectly) by the title.  Woolf is by this point very deliberately placing more emphasis on the world inhabited by protagonists than the protagonists themselves (hence Jacob’s Room rather than Jacob); the “world” here meaning places (Scarborough, Cambridge, London, Greece) and people (too many to name), sometimes intersecting with each other, glancing off each other in coincidental or accidental ways – a whole novel of Evelyn Murgatroyds.  The book has no plot to speak of – no artificial imposition of rising and falling action, no climax, barely even a beginning or ending.  That it proceeds chronologically is sometimes an article of faith (occasionally Woolf dashes through Run Lola Run-style future biographies of people whose lives are peripheral to the recurring characters’).  To tie the sweeping procession of places and people together in a way that is both real and comprehensible, Woolf stridently employs all the techniques she tried out in her short fiction – the consciousness-streams of 'The Mark on the Wall' and 'An Unwritten Novel,' the swinging camera of 'Kew Gardens,' the poetry of 'Monday Or Tuesday' (which we won’t discuss here for reasons of space).  Jacob’s Room is, in other words, another experiment; approached much like the short stories, but just longer.  This is precisely what Woolf was shooting for, as her diary makes clear: “Suppose that one thing should open out of another – as in An Unwritten Novel – not for 10 pages but 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesn’t that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything?” (Source: David Bradshaw’s introduction to the Oxford World Classics collection of The Mark on the Wall and other short fictions.)  Jacob’s Room synthesizes the modern literary techniques of Woolf’s short stories and applies them to the same task that lurked in the background of The Voyage Out: sabotaging the conventional novel.

It is, of course, an open question whether Woolf succeeds, in Jacob’s Room and elsewhere.  For the most part, she does – The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, ‘An Unwritten Novel,’ and ‘Kew Gardens’ all give us compelling, believable sketches of human beings and their world – made all the more believable by the fact that they are only sketches.  However, in the case of the two novels, Woolf swings so hard away from creating a mythic, falsified central character that she inadvertently creates a different myth.  The peripheral individuals in The Voyage Out and Jacob’s Room are evoked with such elegance and completeness (and in the case of The Voyage Out, in so very many words) that their strange, sometimes nearly-absent protagonists gain a Keyser Soze-esque mystique, haunting their respective books like ghosts.  And there are other ways in which the works are arguably unsuccessful – The Voyage Out clearly does deserve at least to some extent the cold shoulder that even Woolf eventually seems to have given it, for reasons discussed above.  Jacob’s Room has its own faults, but they appear chiefly when one is searching through it for the social satire promised by the dust jacket – with Jacob’s life and death so vague, it is hard to draw from the novel any clear commentary on the world he inhabits – the novel’s point of view depends on which character and scene you happen to be rereading at the moment.  These concerns, however, lie outside the scope of this essay.

Jacob’s Room, like Woolf’s later work, is radical, challenging, and rich.  But it is very clear that it is not the first manifestation of Woolf’s innovative streak – neither were her short stories, despite her “all in a flash” comments.  From the very beginning, Ms. Woolf was attempting to break out of the fossilized forms of conventional fiction, and from the very beginning, she had meaningful success in this endeavour.  That it took several stabs to get it right is understandable, and even Jacob’s Room is best understood as an experiment; but, it is this gradual development, this series of false starts and probes into literary deep space, that makes the course of Woolf’s early work so fascinating.

Addison Godel,  July 2002
with some revisions August 2006

Email Me   -   Back to Academic Writings   -   Back to Ummagurau.com