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VIRGINIAWOOLF–MOMENTSOFBEING
Ana Clara Birrento – Universidade de Évora
Put before the labyrinth and proliferation of critical perspectives,
studies and readings on Virginia Woolf, entangled in articulations of teleologies
and epistemologies, the critic faces a question: from where should she/he
start writing, on what and from which critical perspective? These were the
circumstances that dictated my choice of writing on “A Sketch of the Past”,
published in Moments of Being – A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, (1976,
1985) and of analysing the narrative strategies used by the author to tell herself,
to construct her identity and power, giving voice and authority to herself as a
discursive formation.
In 1929, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explained the nonexistence of authoritative female figures, metaphorically represented by
Shakespeare’s sister: when wondering about the reasons why women had not
written as much as men, her conclusion was that historically women had been
deprived of education, money, status and a room of their own in which to
write. Were women given the intellectual and material conditions - “[if we]
have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit
of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little
from the common sitting-room […] If we face the fact that there is no arm to
cling to” (AROO 148-149) -, then Shakespeare’s sister would be born.
The repression of the feminine discourse condemned it to silence and
Shakespeare’s neglected sister was only born when women were given the
power of the word and of representation, when women projected in history
an identity which does not fit into the androcentric paradigm of inflexible
egos; she was born when women revealed their identity by acknowledging
the presence of the other, an identity that is both unique and relational – a
flexible ego in a world characterized by relationships.
While the masculine tradition of autobiographical writing has taken as
a premise the capacity of the writer to create a mirror effect and has made use
of a stable and fixed perspective to constitute the self as the unifying element
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of time, space and identity, showing a stable and autonomous self as a hero,
the self, created in a feminine text, is not a teleological entity, nor an isolated
being, but rather a self constructed on the consciousness of the meaning of the
cultural category - to be a woman.
The feminine autobiography writes another story, as it has helped
women to be reborn in the act of writing and of reconstructing several
discourses - of representation and of ideology - in which subjectivity has been
formed. The autobiographical self is no longer a singular entity but a net of
multiple and heterogeneous differences within which the self is inscribed (cf.
Gilmore), changing the monocultural imperatives of the being,
In her Diary (18 Nov. 1940) Virginia Woolf writes that “male autobiographies
are little boy’s sand castles: I am the sea that demolishes those castles”.
Assuming her role as an agent of change, powerful enough to write a project of
becoming (cf. Hall), Woolf takes for herself the cultural agency as the product
of diagrams of mobility and placement which map the possibilities of where
and how certain vectors of influence can stop and be replaced.
Writing and thinking within a male-oriented and male-defined tradition,
Virginia Woolf refuses the formal paradigms, “to make an orderly and expressed
work of art, where one thing follows another and all are swept into a whole”
(MB 75). She shapes events into a story with an end, using a strategy which
brings a closure on time, on knowledge and on the self (cf. Robbins).
Positioning myself in a critical agenda which reads autobiography not as
life itself, but rather as a text of life, I consider that we can read “A Sketch of the
Past” as a geography of the possible (cf. Probyn 1993), as a map of possibilities
of the self, where Virginia Woolf (subject and object of the autobiography)
and the reader move and acknowledge conditions of possibility or plausibility
(cf. Sinfield) for an individual and social existence. To do this we have also to
bear in mind some questions concerning representation and memory, as it is
by means of these that experiences are reshaped and the self recreated in a
new landscape.
In the process of rewriting the self we tell a story, by definition not
a recounting of experience as it was, but a fiction of the self, a selective
and imaginative construction of who we have been and who we are; an
autobiography is a story we weave out of the tangled threads we believe to be
responsible for the texture of our lives (cf. Freeman).
To understand the autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf as
a geography of the possible is to understand it as the consciousness of the
author in choosing and in selecting the ways of what should be represented in
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the autobiographical text and how to do it, leaving to the reader the task of
knowing and discovering the identity who knows itself and who materializes
itself through discourse; of discovering the identity who chooses strategies,
practices and technologies to represent itself as a cultural construction of
power, through discursive alliances and in a network of voices and positions.
Writing autobiographically is an act of interpretation, where the lived
experience is shaped, constrained and transformed by representation, to
which the self owes its existence, and in which it evolves and finds expression.
This representation implies the positions from where one writes or speaks
(cf. Hall), which, in turn, imply the enunciative positions that constitute the
self as a new kind of subject. As Gilmore argues, the autobiographical identity
and agency are not identical to the real identity and agency; the former are
representations of the latter, or better their construction. Between the selfnarrator and the self-narrated there is a temporal and spatial distance which
determines the enunciative position. We write and we speak from a particular
time and place, within a specific history and a culture: what we say is always
contextualized and positioned.
The position we occupy in a social space, the practices and the identities
are not separated categories in a deterministic or hierarchical relationship;
they mutually inform each other, creating a dense and detailed texture of
narratives, of relationships and of experiences. The self is a set of techniques
and practices based on daily life (cf. Probyn 1993). But it is not only the writers
who are influenced by the social world. The readers, by bringing their horizons
of expectation to their reading, also construct a narrative, since the different
horizons of expectation, the different readings and different interpretations
of each reader are determined by already constituted social differences, which
construct the experiential context in which the readers appropriate the text.
Either representing a public realm or a private, more intimate one,
autobiography draws a terrain where both authors and readers move and
where they recognize conditions of plausibility for the representation of their
experiences. Representing the self in a filigree of ontological, epistemological
and organizational principles of identity, “A Sketch of the Past” can be read
as a geography of the possible where the self is represented by means of
several technologies of power and several trajectories, establishing a dynamic
relationship between author, text and reader.
As a form which invents, in its fictional representation, an identity which
only exists in the common and shared space of the narrative, the “Sketch”
is the product of Woolf’s consciousness and capacity to invest in affective
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elements which, in turn, allow the reader to feel that space as a knowable
space of relations, drawing maps of meaning. By choosing and selecting the
moments and the facts from where she creates, Virginia Woolf is not only
representing her own experience, she is also bringing to the fictional space
of communication what she wishes and wants to be known, revealing the past
by the forms she chooses, stressing the fact that “these separate moments of
being were however embedded in many moments of non-being” (MB 70), of
which she doesn’t speak.
The postulation of a meaning to a past event dictates the choice of the
facts which she wants to retain and the details which she wants to preserve or
forget, according to a preconceived intelligibility and leads her to know that
in certain favourable moods, memories - what one has forgotten - come to the
top. Now if it is so, is it not possible - I often wonder - that things we have felt
with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact
still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device
will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it - the past - as an avenue
lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions (MB 67).
This choice determines the type of story she wants to tell, in it the
faults, the lapses and the deformations of memory take place. These faults, in
spite of not being the product of a physical cause or of mere hazard, are the
result of a conscious choice of the author who remembers and who wants to
gain recognition of a revised and corrected version of the past. As a matter of
fact, the author participates in that fictional space of communication before
the reader, as what the former gives to the latter is her interpretation, as an
active agent in the choices of what is fictionally created. Virginia Woolf, aware
of this narrative technique, questions herself: “Why have I forgotten so many
things that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than
what I do remember?” (MB 70).
In “A Sketch”, the obstacles to a full reconstruction of the past turn
visible and inevitable that there is the creation of a new past, similar to it
but also different from it. In spite of all the efforts at truthfulness, the truth
the text produces is always necessarily revisited, corrected and revised in
its telling, a mixture of past and present, a process of self-invention. In this
reconstruction of the past, memory is a fundamental tool, a technology of
power (cf. Foucault 1988), as it selects the images which the subject wants to
transmit according to the place and the time of the enunciation. Fully aware of
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65
this power Woolf, from the standpoint of the present, writes “some of my first
memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because
the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more
important” (MB 69). Past has no other existence besides the representation not
of facts withdrawn from memory, but the representation by the words based
on the residual images of memory, as they are the only appropriate means of
communication - the verbal configuration of reminiscences that “leave out
the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to
describe any human being” (MB 65).
To tell a life is to represent what no longer exists, it is a means to deal
with the irrecoverability of the past (cf. Eakin), it is a representation which
extends itself in time, like a succession of signs. Memories and the different
voices by which Woolf enunciates herself allow her to convince the reader
of the existence of another level of abstraction, the one of her individual
being. This ontological position is articulated with an epistemological project,
to the extent that, while a dimension of the being is proposed, it is based on
a historical context. Under the disguise of showing herself as she was, Woolf
exerts the right to recover the possession of her existence then and now.
Autobiography is never the final and fixed image of a life, because “it
is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen. The
person is evidently immensely complicated” (MB 69). The image of the self is
always constructed, since memories look for an essence beyond existence,
and, by doing it, create that essence. To represent a life only reveals an image
of that same life, an image which is distant and incomplete, distorted by the
fact that the subject who remembers is not the same who as a child, as an
adolescent or even as a young adult lived the past, showing thus that change is
the operative metaphor in the autobiographical discourse (cf. Barros).
The image of childhood and adolescence to which the reader has access
in “A Sketch” is but the result of an act of imagination of those phases of life.
Memory produces a narrative subjectivity, working upon consciousness, dissolving it and fragmenting it, diluting the frontiers between past and present.
The passage, in memory, of the effective experience to consciousness
accomplishes a kind of repetition of that same experience and helps change its
meaning. The remembered past loses “its flesh and bone” (Gusdorf), but gains
a new and more intimate relation with individual life which, after having been
dispersed, can be discovered and reorganized in a non temporal way. The
inclusion of all the memories and meanings in the autobiographical text, with
the aim of making sense of the structure of the past, is nothing else than the
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construction of a fiction, an imaginative, selective and literary construction of
who she has been and of who she is at the moment of writing.
Paradigmatically autobiographical writing implies a certain distance
of the self in relation to her/his other self, in order to reconstitute it as a
unity and as an identity throughout time. The process of self-comprehension is
reminiscent, in the sense that it gathers together all the dimensions of the self,
the dimensions which had been until the moment of writing, unarticulated,
dispersed, scattered or lost. This reminiscence is, in “A Sketch” a critical and
active process which combines emotions and moments of self-reflection and
which gives access to omitted experiences, allowing memory to see the events
of the past in a new way, in a new landscape. The order given to the events is
not inherent in the events themselves, but rather an option of the author and
a reflection upon herself.
Manipulating the act of writing and the act of remembering, in order to
attain her main goal: to write about her first memory - her mother’s lap - and
about her obsession - her mother, “the whole thing” (MB .83), Virginia Woolf
inverts the order of the events:
Perhaps we were going to St. Ives; more probably, for from the light it must
have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient
artistically to suppose that we were going to St. Ives, for that will lead to my
other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the
most important of all my memories (MB 64).
“A Sketch of the Past” articulates a moment in Virginia Woolf’s life and
is inserted in a collection of memoirs, constituting each of them fragments
of the author’s life, written for different audiences, at different times, where
Woolf expresses her view of the self in general and of herself in particular.
These sketches work as a place of identification, a place that is alternative
to the fiction; she has a formal consciousness of the act of writing, putting
an emphasis in the self-reflexivity of the writing and of the narrated self.
While writing about herself, Woolf creates a story informed by a dynamics
of self-consciousness (cf. Anderson). This makes her write that “among the
innumerable things left out in my sketch I have left out the most important
- those instincts, affections, passions, attachments - there is no single word
for them, for they changed month by month” (MB 79-80). The texts collected
in Moments of Being come to be a meditation on her own relationships, on her
responsibilities and on her art.
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Interesting also, is the fact that the selection and possible editing that
her husband did, for the publication of A Writer’s Diary, gave the reader the
idea that Virginia Woolf was mostly concerned by her professional, intellectual
and literary life, leaving behind all the ontological levels of her existence
as a woman and her intense interaction with people in her day-to-day life.
Leonard Woolf wanted his wife to be read as someone who was fully inside
the literary and professional canon of the elitist intellectual circles of the
beginning of the century. But Virginia left us another lesson - the possibility of
a double articulation of the knowledge of the self and the care of the self, of
the constraints of daily life and of the intellectual circles.
In “A Sketch of the Past” we have a narrative that frames the narrative of
the past, in a juxtaposition of the past and of the present selves. By introducing
each entry with fragments of her present self Virginia Woolf chooses a strategy
which makes the reader aware that her mature consciousness is continually
searching and commenting on the past, explaining for herself and for the
reader the meanings and the positions which at the time of happening had not
been clear and evident for the self who had experienced them. At the moment
of writing, a moment which has already determined the beginning and the end
of the story, as well as the mode how the self is represented and has developed
throughout the times, Virginia Woolf finds the strategy to represent memories
of the past, and knows that to represent a past experience means to reflect
on it in the present: “I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a
possible form for these notes. That is, to make them include the present - at
least enough of the present to serve as platform to stand upon” (MB 75).
It is from the critical position of the present, an adult, mature and widely
recognised as a literary figure, that she looks at the past, using, as she says,
her present experiences as a platform, as a filter to look back; it is only in the
present that she can represent the lived experiences and conceive the past and
the future, in a temporal dynamics (cf. Pickering). We are before a self who is
filtering past experiences through a succession of present selves, in a process
of rewriting the self. Through a backward and forward movement, the past and
the experience structure and restructure themselves mutually (cf. Pickering)
allowing the reader to understand the fictional strategies of Virginia Woolf in
her emphasis on the changes and continuities of an individual identity, putting
the stress on what Luisa Flora (2002: 57) has called “the fluid contradictory
method Virginia Woolf developed”.
Thus, “A Sketch of the Past”, mapping possibilities of the self, figures
a possible representation, a moment of being in a geography of the possible
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- in a landscape of being - where “this past is much affected by the present
moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time” (MB 75). The
author knows that the process of recounting an experience, of rewriting the
self is a process that “leave[s] out the person to whom things happened” (MB
65). Questioning, “Who was I then?” (MB 65) Woolf claims that “[i]t would
be interesting to make the two people, I now; I then, come out in contrast”
(MB 75). In the act of remembering the past in the present, she imagines the
existence of another person, of another world, none of which real and under
no circumstance having a possibility of existing in the present. The horizontal
axis of the past is crossed by the vertical axis of the present, the one that
contains in itself the immediate and the real (cf. Gilmore).
For Virginia Woolf, to write these autobiographical fragments is an
act of interpretation, where the lived experience is shaped, constrained and
transformed by representation to which the self owes its existence and in
which it evolves and finds expression:
Many bright colours; many distinct sounds, some human beings, caricatures;
comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene
which they cut out; and all surrounded by a vast space - that is a rough visual
description of childhood. This is how I shape it; and how I see myself as a child
(MB 79).
Accepting that the self represented in “A Sketch of the Past” is a fluctuating one, a self that represents itself in several layers of meaning, the text
constitutes a discursive arrangement that brings together, in tension, the different lines of meaning of the self and raises a fundamental question: how
does Virginia Woolf organize the experience and the knowledge of the self? By
means of a process of choice and selection, she creates the coherent knots and
the insertion in the real. Woolf is profoundly aware that in all the writing she
had done - as critic or as novelist - she had had to find a representative scene, “a
means of summing up and making a knot out of innumerable little threads” (MB
142). This acquired capacity and technique is very valuable when writing about
herself, since “scene making is my natural way of marking the past” (MB 142).
In “A Sketch of the Past” the process of selection and of scene making
culminates in the representation of a few important knots - the most intimate
memories of Virginia Woolf: the relationship with her mother, leading the reader
to a private, emotive, affectionate realm of existence, and the relationship
with her father. The latter takes the reader to the intellectual circles which she
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69
knew from the inside and to the house in Hyde Park, described as the cage,
conveying her discomfort in living in such a neighbourhood:
The street below was a cul-de-sac. Our house was near the blank brick wall at
the end. Hyde Park Gate, which led nowhere, but made a little sealed loop out
of the great high road running from Hammersmith to Piccadilly, was something
like a village street. a place which led nowhere” (MB 119).
The memories of her mother are memories of an obsession – “She was
the whole thing” (MB 83) - of an omnipresent creator, in the very centre of
“that great Cathedral space which was childhood” (MB 81) of the creator of
“that crowded merry world which spun so gaily in the centre of my childhood”
(MB 84).
Her father was also an obsession to Virginia Woolf; he keeps alive in
her memory as the writer, rather than as the father; “I call him a strange
character” (MB 107), “a little Victorian early Victorian boy, brought up in the
intense narrow, evangelical yet political, highly intellectual yet completely
unaesthetic, Stephen family, that had one step in Clapham, the other in
Downing Street” (MB 108).
Through his books I can get at the writer father still; but when Nessa and I
inherited the rule of the house, I knew nothing of the sociable father, and the
writer father was much more exacting and pressing than he is now that I find
him only in books; and it was the tyrant father - the exacting, the violent, the
histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self-pitying, the deaf, the
appealing, the alternately loved and hated father - that dominated me then
(MB 116).
However, she is able to exert her present consciousness and critical
capacity and look back in time, recognizing that, in the moment of writing,
she is able to understand and see what she had not been able to see - “the
gulf between us, that was cut by our difference in age” (MB 147) - was but the
gulf between two ages - the Victorian and the Edwardian -, where the latter
wishing to look into the future was still under the power of the former and
thus creating a friction and a conflict.
We were not his children; we were his grandchildren. There should have been a
generation between us to cushion the contact. […] Explorers and revolutionists,
as we both were by nature, we lived under the sway of a society that was about
fifty years too old for us. It was this curious fact that made our struggle so bitter
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and so violent. For the society in which we lived was still the Victorian society.
Father himself was a typical Victorian. George and Gerald were consenting and
approving Victorians. So that we had two quarrels to wage; two fights to fight;
one with them individually; and one with them socially. We were living say in
1910; they were living in 1860 (MB 147).
The description of the house is also revealing of Virginia Woolf’s strategies in representing herself and the social and historical conditions of her life.
Totally Victorian in style, “a complete model of Victorian society” (MB 147), it
was a three-storey house, where, as she recalls, her two realms of existence
co-existed: downstairs there was pure convention, “The tea table, the very
hearth and centre of family life […]. The tea table rather than the dinner table
was the centre of Victorian family life (MB 118); upstairs pure intellect, there
“[f]rom ten to one Victorian society did not exert any special pressure upon us”
(MB 148); Virginia could dedicate herself to her realm of creativity.
However, as she says “I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that
the two halves symbolized” (MB 124).
In “A Sketch of the Past” we can find a balance between the meaning
to express the experience of the self, in its physical and mental component
and the way how that experience is verbalized, given to the others in the
contexts of social experience. The epistemological use of experience proves
the interrelation of structural determination and the individual relationships;
if at an ontological level experience postulates a separate realm of existence
– “the immediate experiential self”- (Probyn 1993: 16), at an epistemological
level, Virginia Woolf reveals herself in her conditions of possibility and finds
alternative enunciative positions in the construction of the self in general and
of herself in particular. In an articulation of subject, discourse and history,
Woolf constructs a self who has no existence prior to the text and who does
not coalesce with its creator.
The several enunciative modalities, the discontinuity of the planes
(cf. Foucault 1972) Virginia Woolf uses as daughter, sister, friend and woman
of letters, do not refer to a synthesis or to a unifying function, but rather
show dispersions, revealing the different states, places and positions that she
occupies or is given in the moment of writing.
In tracing maps of identification and belonging (cf. Grossberg), the act
of remembering is a political act in the sense that what is recollected and what
is obscured is central to the cultural production of knowledge about the past
and thus to the terms of Woolf’s self-knowledge and authority.
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