Slipping into Fiction

 The sentence that has been vexing me in our readings from Woolf this week is this: "Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom­ if freedom exists...." ("Mark on the Wall").

I am provoked to think that Woolf is reacting against hierarchies: of Masculinity, of Aristotlean categories for literature (plot, narrative, tragedy...), Whitaker's Table of Precedency. Precedence - coming before, and coming after: "The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker." The ordering of separate things along the lines of thought which are both rigid and highly spacialized. The spacialization of precedence is a spacial logic that governs the  narrative so indispensable for the materialists who preceded Woolf. For these writers, (fictional) reality required an "air-tight" ordering, a lineage without gaps, a time without duration between the marking of seconds, and Woolf found this "reality" uninhabitable ("Modern Fiction"). Her suspension of all forms of plot and narrative as well as her revolt against the demands of representational fiction (the obsession with details of "reality" which avoided life), is, I am provoked to think, a liberation. 

"We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account" ("Modern Fiction").  Woolf demanded liberation from the oppressive hierarchies which had confined the imagination, the human spiritual life, and the process of making literature to the repetition of the Same, "a circular tendency" ("Modern Fiction"). The spacial-logic of the past conventions (modulating policies regarding table clothes) obscured the raw depths of creativity and thought beneath a prison, both covering and confining. The space of the prison demanded a free space, an open space, without limit or obstruction since the spacial-logic that worked to ossify was in its process ossifying another space, that of depth, or of continuity, or of succession (in contrast to precedence), where each thought moved to the next with-out order but in pleasure.

Precedence is the space of 1, 2, 3... the space of Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action... and is, if we think that Woolf fought against fiction-writing for the liberation of fiction-writing, a space guaranteed by its repression of Life, gaps, or more in the language of Woolf, "depth." She writes, "I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts" ("The Mark on the Wall"). Precedence takes place on the surface, where 1 and 2 and 3 are separate "facts" and Whitaker's Table of Precedency is merely a table, a solid one, with a cloth, probably "made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them." No breaks, no gaps covered by the tablecloth. However, the space of pleasure radically undercuts the table[cloth]. The space of pleasure is guaranteed not by the abstract spacial-logic of surface which represses depth, but in the depths of human imagination, an eruption instigated by the mark on the wall, that little mark which stands off of the wall, just a bit - an annoying bump under the tablecloth that you can't ever smooth out.

"Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall" ("The Mark on the Wall"). Thinking about the mark on the wall is thinking about thinking. Vertiginous by nature of its reflexivity, thinking thought extends into the depths, and this for Woolf is pleasure. The banal thoughts, those banal "trains of thought" where thoughts look in the mirror with glazed over eyes give way to the depths of reflection. As Woolf writes, "And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories..." ("The Mark on the Wall"). The train of thought (precedence) becomes the trains of thoughts (pleasure) that surround the mark because the tracks have been transgressed. 

The space of precedence gives way to the space of pleasure which is not guided but lead. The guide's agenda succumbs to the pull of the depths in pleasure. As Roland Barthes writes in The Pleasure of the Text, "The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ides - for my body does not have the same ideas I do" (17). The body, the body of the text, loves the mark on the wall. Exuberantly it pursues ideas sequentially but not orderly. A sequence without order forms the space of pleasure... "I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes...." The first idea that passes... it is not the writer of fiction who passes but ideas, which indicates the radically altered space of infinite locality opened by the mark. Here, one "slips" along the sequence of the body (textual and personal in this other space), ecstatically [ex-stasis].

And as I am provoked to think this (by Woolf's mark, i.e. "The Mark on the Wall"), I am yet led to think that this is not so much a liberation from what Woolf described as materialist literature which is repression. The space of precedence demands that we we see Woolf's work "critically," with some distance. Whitaker would write that Woolf comes after the Materialists, who preceded her, and that she will precede someone else. Repression => Liberation => Repression? To think of Woolf as liberation is to represent her relationship in the realm of the same spacial logic against which she revolted. It is to think superficially, i.e. on the surface of things, riding the bullet-train of literary history, but that image too is built on precedence! Surface Thinking => Deep Thinking. If I ask the question, "Where is Woolf coming from?" precedence has been invoked and Woolf is spacialized against Woolf, in a way. It would make Woolf the half-phantom and not Whitaker.

But there again, as always, are Woolf and Whitaker. How to think about Woolf-and-Whitaker as Woolf might and not Woolf-against-Whitaker as Whitaker? The question is borderline absurd, as one asking the question "how can learn to slip?" But then again, as always, there are the marks, the marks that Woolf writes, the marks of her fiction, the marks of her thought, slipping on and on, and to question the slippage of language would be as pointless as questioning laughter - if we do it is only at the expense of laughter.

The space of pleasure laughs at the space of precedence. Woolf descends into the depths, slipping from one phantom to another without rigid separation of things, catching in language "the first idea that passes..." and in this place, who could care about the men of action who administer the domains of precedence? They become pale, phantom-like, the shadows of Life - shadow puppetry for laughs in the uninterrupted repose in January, smoking a cigarette. The pacifism of this space of pleasure where Woolf slips/writes is not hostile towards its predecessors because they are not predecessors, inconceivable in the diffuse space of Woolf's fiction. It is a space too diffuse to hold on to the clumps of thought formulated by precedence-logic (these sets of plot-devices, these groups of writers) which form obstacles in the region of thought, things that interrupt and cut pleasure. This shows us that this space of Woolf's depth is so flat it tolerates no gravity (curvature of space); this diffusion across space allows for maximum slippage. The writing of pleasure in the space of pleasure is a film not laid across a table but across Life. Transparent to certain logics of vision, it diffuses thinking into its myriad modalities and writing into its infinite forms.

But isn't this surface? A film? Skin? I think Woolf returns us back to surface, but not a regimented surface made into a surface so as to become regular. Her's is the surface of the mark, a surface into which one is limitlessly drawn. The void is a surface but like a sponge. It soaks up thought and redistributes it across the open spaces. It is permeable, but is nevertheless "in" the sponge since the sponge absorbs into its pure surface area. In this sense, Woolf's logical space is perhaps only slightly different from the space of order in that it permeates and does not penetrate. In Woolf we once again return to surfaces, but surfaces radically different from the regulated configurations on the tablecloth. It may be that while in a critical sense the nature of her fiction is profoundly different from the materialists that she splits from, her own slipping - the "which... which... which..." of the leading quote - draws us into a kind of sponge-space where it is hard to tell the difference between a s/nail. And where is the pleasure in that?