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Antiquity and Modernity: Jacob’s Room and the ‘Greek Myth’
Abstract
Modernity defines itself along the terms it sets up for antiquity. But, as was argued in Chapter 1, the relation between the two is not as unequivocal as it may at first seem. Instead, it is characterized by contradictions and an ambivalence which reflects the complex nature of modernity’s understanding of itself. On the one hand, definitions of modernity attribute to antiquity the permanence and stability that the former lacks and, on the other, antiquity is construed as congenial to modernity by sharing precisely what putatively sets them apart, namely transience. It seems that the ultimate and innermost affinity between modernity and antiquity reveals itself in their liability to historicity, to the effect of time passing which will make modernity ancient some day. This ambiguity is reflected in Woolf’s ambivalent relationship to classical Greek as the paradigm of antiquity. She views Greek as both a symbol of timeless permanence and of something past and passé, of ‘no help to us’ with the problems of civilization today.2 It is on this latter negation that modernism’s claim to originality is predicated. While being aware of its own historical specificity, modernist art is also motivated by the desire to become classical one day, to stamp its impression on history precisely by defining itself against past traditions. Like modernity, modernism too is thus both anticlassical and classical.3
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Early readers of Jacob’s Room responded to the book’s comic elements as well as to its pathos; modern critics, on the other hand, concentrate on the form, and usually comment also on the sad absurdity of Jacob’s life, a life cut off prematurely by the First World War. The comedy is of primary importance, however, and it is closely linked to the book’s form and to Jacob’s ‘character’, sketchy as his character may seem to be. The novel is in some ways a parody, and many of its peculiarities in form, point of view and characterisation are linked to the parodic impulse. The comedy and the ‘form’ of Jacob’s Room derive partly from a strategy of literary attack. The form shows very clearly the marks of its being a playful yet serious rebellion; it is held together by the shadowy structure of the very thing it is against: the Bildungsroman.
I read—then I lay down the book—& say—what right have I, a woman to read all these things that men have done? They would laugh if they saw me.
[The common reader] is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.
You know the scene, the scene of your students reading Woolf. If you are not (yet) teachers, you can imagine it; you can recreate the scene of your own first reading of Woolf. At least for those of us far from the scenes of elite education, there is (at first) the confusion, bewilderment in their (our) eyes, the sense of reading on quicksand, the fear of speaking uncertainty, the resistance to uncovering bafflement—the resistance, period. Think back on To the Lighthouse, you, your students, virginal [End Page 101] readers. What is happening? Where are we? Who is thinking? Who is speaking? What time is it? Where (oh where) is the voice that will make sense of these shifting and sliding voices, moving sometimes even within a single sentence from one center of consciousness to another? The whirl dizzies, the vertigo of reading Woolf for the first time.
We might think that in this postmodern media age—with the multiple, split narratives of a Northern Exposure or L.A. Law, with the visual montage of startling juxtapositions on MTV, with fragmentation of unitary authority in the competing voices of media anchors whose personalities are more news than the news—that our students would feel right at home with the disruptions of a Woolf text. That most of them do not is a sign of the normative power for the printed page of traditional conventions of representation established by the novel, especially the nineteenth-century realist novel.
We all have our strategies for teaching Woolf, for breaking down this initial resistance, for calming students down, for urging them to take up the challenge. We may contextualize: by setting the scene of Edwardian and postwar England; narrating tales of Bloomsbury, the Stephen household, the marriage to Leonard, the love for Vita, the incidents of incest, the bouts of illness; by staging the grand entrance of modernism; by theorizing the feminist and the feminine. We may show slides of impressionist, postimpressionist, and cubist art or present parallels in filmic technique. We may begin with some short stories—"A Mark on the Wall," "Kew Gardens," "The New Dress"—to build up a careful craft of reading that can be adapted for the longer texts. We may introduce Woolf's textual practice through the voice of the theorist in "Modern Fiction," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," and A Room of One's Own. We may exhort the students to climb the mountain of textual challenge: the view at the top is worth it, the effort ultimately exhilarating (you can do it; you, the little engine that could). We may lecture or split the class into small groups, each with a task to perform and report. We may "brilliantly" synthesize or sit in the silence until students begin to speak. We may encourage impressionistic responses to what they think they did not understand. We may lead them to unravel a passage, piece by piece. We may dramatize: pound the desk to mark the heartbeat and the tick-tock of the lighthouse beam.
Our strategies, of course, differ by the context in which we teach (where is our classroom? who are our students? how large is the class?); by the kind of course in which Woolf appears (a course on modernism? on women's writing? on the novel? on the short story? the essay? on British literature? on feminist theory? on just Woolf herself?); by our pedagogical principles along the spectrum of authority; and by the various critical methodologies we...
"Hey, you there!" comes the call in Althusser's famous anecdote of interpellation, and the individual thus hailed turns around and becomes a subject, becomes a subject because he recognizes that the call is for him, because "individuals are always-already subjects" (Althusser, "Ideology" 176). Ideology "recruits" subjects, and what I want to suggest here is that Jacob is "recruited" by ideology, from that first shout by his brother, "Ja—cob! Ja—cob!" (JR 5), which recruits him for the family, to the point where he answers off-stage the pointing finger and "I Want You!" of Lord Kitchener's famous recruiting poster and is enlisted in the war that kills him.
Jacob has been much misunderstood, repeatedly maligned for not being the character readers have expected him to be. Some have accepted this as a good thing, on the grounds that Virginia Woolf could not create character anyway and at least Jacob's Room makes no claim to creating character; others have grumbled that she does manage to show the other characters in the book, and thus her claims that we can never really know another person are disingenuous.1 What all the negative criticism [End Page 147] underscores is that in the figure of Jacob Woolf is not representing character; what she is exploring is the construction, and representation of, the subject.
In Reading People, Reading Plots James Phelan argues that we can approach character through three main categories: the thematic (character as idea), the synthetic (character as artificial construct), and the mimetic (character as person).2 These categories are never mutually exclusive, and we can see that Jacob falls under all three. The thematic aspect is obvious, Jacob represents the young men who died in the war; the synthetic is foregrounded by the narrator herself who wonders about the possibility of knowing another human being (JR 119-121) and about the legitimacy of drawing character (JR 262). It is when we get to the mimetic that things become troublesome. Whether we figure Jacob inhabiting an actual world or merely a possible world, readers have been persistently concerned with his lapses as a mimetic character, apparently unwilling to regard him solely or principally as a thematic element or a synthetic construct.
In Jacob's Room Woolf seems to be giving us a "type-like individual," a character who, while representing a class, is nevertheless an individual.3 We see him interacting with a wide variety of characters; we see him engaging in various activities; and we are given information about his appearance, background, and attitudes not only through the narrator but also through other characters. Woolf seems determined to make him represent but at the same time transcend his category of the educated young man in the early twentieth century.
Yet she stops short and leaves us on the verge of identification. Readers agree that this is the case, but little has been said about how this is achieved, and less still about why.
To address the "how" first: in an article on literary character from the point of view of cognitive psychology, Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton argue that one way readers become immersed in literary worlds is through causality. Readers tend, as in real life, to attribute the cause of events to characters rather than to other circumstances in the situation. In reading a novel we accumulate information to generate expectations about what is to come, and we regard the characters as the determinants of the action to such a degree that even with highly formulaic [End Page 148] works (such as James Bond novels) or works that are well known and have been read before (such as Hamlet) we fail to notice the formula, and we do experience suspense even if the work is familiar to us:
readers are so solidly predisposed to find the causes of events in the characters rather than in the circumstances that reflection upon the "formula" plays no role in their immediate experience of the novel.
Authors can exploit this tendency on the part of the reader, and at the very least are unlikely to...
The Subject in Jacob’s Room
- See
- Bishop
- KJ Philips
Metaphor and the Subversive Process of Virginia Woolf’s Essays
- Edward Bishop
- E Bishop
Judy Little’s well-argued articleJacob’s Room as Comedy: Woolf’s Parodic Bildungsroman
- Cf
Virginia Woolf’s Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and Her “Common Readers”
- See Susan Stanford Friedman
- SS Friedman
work on Woolf’s relation to and various uses and representations of Greek, the most exhaustive being Rowena Fowler’s insightful articles
- E Bishop