Cinema and "The Cinema"

Discerning Woolf's personal views of the cinema is a complex business if we take into account the turbid relationships literature has had with the up-start art form of film. Even in Woolf's day film was known for its parasitic relationship with the novel (beginning with Thomas Edison's Frankenstein) so it would not be surprising for us to finder her unsympathetic toward film, if not a bit hostile. The speed at which film's images communicate, as opposed to literature and painting is another area in which Woolf might be seen to deplore cinema and its hold on viewers, the savages that compose modern society. These English "savages" with their "unaesthetic eye" which "is a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up" ("The Cinema") are confounded by the visual intensity of the moving image. We might think that, in this light, the cinema for Woolf could have been a plague upon the imagination. As Kafka once said, film puts the eye in uniform, so that all see the same, all feel the same, all think the same - savages bewildered by shadows on a cave wall.The imagination is shackled by images strangely real for the eye but too-real for the mind Additionally, the directors of film too receive some criticism from Woolf. Cinema is an art "born fully clothed" and lacks the maturity in its artists. The savages are unsure of their new instruments, and perhaps find it all too easy to rip-off literary works for inspiration.

Of course Woolf's view of cinema is more complex even if there are hints of disdain. She does see in it a profound power of emotion in the cinema. The terrifying tadpole in Dr. Calligari provides Woolf with an example of the lucid yet elusive evocation the cinema is able to create. Unlike literature, in which a tadpole could scarcely become frightening (the words "a frightening sight" would dull the edge, as would any words), by showing something as benign as a tadpole, looming on the screen (accidentally even!) can seem "fear itself." This power of cinema to not merely represent but to show a kind of reality superseding experience, intervening in the flow of our imaginations to erupt in a strange and powerful fear by the image of a tadpole is certainly a quality in cinema's favor. Human consciousness stands to gain from cinema in a way literature itself could not provide. The vapid nature of these images, when combined, accelerates emotions, thoughts, imaginations to what was then an unheard of speed. The intense visuality of cinema creates "The likeness of the thought [which] is for some reason more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available, than the thought itself." Woolf understands that cinema is not thoughtful (not in the way poetry is), even though it is more transparent to thought. This transparency could be a double edged sword. Because of its efficacy the film maker possess "enormous riches at his command" which the literary artist does not. There remains then, a possibility for cinema, even if not yet realized for Woolf. She writes, "If
into this reality he could breathe emotion, could animate the perfect form with thought, then
his booty could be hauled in hand over hand. Then, as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should
be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their
elbows on a table." Which might make us wonder, if Woolf had some sort of vision for cinema (what it might become), was her sympathy for the art's potential because she wanted to see good films one day or perhaps something more universal.

I wonder if Woolf, given this opinion of cinema, was perhaps more interested not so much in making good films (somewhat hard to imagine), but was instead interested in what cinema allowed us to access in terms of our human consciousness. Cinema brought something new to the table and even if that new gift had not yet been fully opened, it still promised new riches for the human imagination. This was what Woolf saw as the treasure to be had in cinema and what made its possibility valuable to Woolf was what Deleuze refers to as the "insistent." Neither Woolf nor Deleuze were interested in what exists in cinema, what it represents accurately or well. The reason a tadpole could become terrifying is because through the tadpole, growing on the screen to monstrous proportions, something else, something that was terrifying, was insisting (not existing) through the moving image. According to Deleuze this relates to Bergson's Whole, of which all moving images subsist though we can not articulate their relationship with the Whole entirely. (This is perhaps why Woolf realized cinema possessed no "thought"). As Deleuze constantly refers this insistence as an opening onto a "spiritual reality" I think the connection with Woolf can be made stronger. I am reminded of the cotton wool in "A Sketch of the Past" through which certain intense moments of consciousness give us a glimpse. Is this not somewhat like the invisible yet effective thread which runs through the moving image, giving us an imperceptible sense of the Whole 

How to un.Write the [Auto]biography of Intensity

Near the beginning of "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf speculates that one day "will it not be possible... that some device will be invented by which we can tap them" (67), that is our memories. Yet this are not "ordinary" memories, memories of "it happened," but the "things we have felt with a great intensity" (67). It is the happenings that not only happen but happen intensely that Woolf is concerned with. (I wonder, by way of digression, if the concept "saturated phenomena" used by phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion would be appropriate here? Something to explore later...). There is a dual peculiarity to these intense happenings: first that they are always happening (a memory-happening), something that re/occurs in her memory not merely as a recollection but as a re-vision (or re-sound, re-touch, etc.). In this sense "A Sketch of the Past" is a recording of memories for which the referent reemerges (from its shell?) more strongly than its initial emergence. The re-given phenomena is more intense than the initially given. However, I don't think that fully captures Woolf's idea of these intense happenings.

A memory-happening yes, "my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems that if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen" (67), but the second peculiarity of these intense happenings is that they are external (a happening-memory). Woolf makes a speculation that "things we have felt with a great intensity have an existence independent of our minds?" (67). More specifically, these external memory-happenings might still be in existence. Beyond the notion of a mere trace of memory, something Woolf makes great use of, this point seems more radical, more intense, and even more impossible. The suggestion in this notion is that not only are certain "memories" some how external, but that the things which happen intensely create a memory that is not reflexive. This non-reflexive memory is hardly a memory in the ordinary sense in which we think memory ("I am remembering myself"). This kind of memory is the non-reflexive middle which does not privilege the mirror of [personal] reflection which inevitably misses the character(s) involved but a means of being caught between the subject and the object, the active and the passive - speaking and writing besides one's self. As rhetoric scholar Eric White writes in his book Kaironomia, "The middle voice provides an alternative, then, to the sadomasochistic desire to establish a final version of the self. Forgoing the reassuring illusion of finality, in the middle voice self would serve only as a provisionally privileged center of pleasure. Such a self would lead a fugitive existence, always on the move from one newly constituted version of itself to another. The middle voice suggests not a fixed and abiding selfhood but a sequence of discontinuous partial selves..." (52). It is my opinion that Woolf, in order to circumvent the petulant methodology of memoir writing which misses the person involved by focusing on the objects which acted upon the individual (the various happenings), found a rhetorical escape in the non-reflexive middle voice. (Again, I want to be clear that it is non-reflexive because the subject is not finding its reflection in objects, White's "sadomasochism," but between sub.-obj. and hence "middle").

Victor Vitanza has articulated the ethics of this ethos in Chaste Rape suggesting that our re/telling of rape narratives (the memories of rape) cannot possibly grapple with the traumas of "It was" (Itys, "it-ys",  the son of Procne and Tereus). "What I have in mind in terms of self-overcoming and the middle voice, and in terms of a mis/appropriate ethos, is what Kate Millett in The Basement has in mind but acts on in her refusal to stand above (so called objectively, outside...) the various texts... she writes about, but enters into these texts..." (31). Vitanza's considerations of un/personal narratives of rape do have bearing on the rhetoric of Woolf's auto-biographical sketch. Both are concerned with "It Was" and will not relegate "It Was" to either the object of personal reflection or subjective identity. Both practices are practices of canonization, of sorts. Vitanza and Woolf have different ethical injunctions, of course, but their rhetorical ethoi are similar (and of course Vitanza owes something to Woolf!). Woolf herself finds objectionable in the sense that each cuts out radical nature of the Event. She needs to "enter into" something it is im/personal, the collision of memory-happening and happening-memory - the memories that emerge from her while they are not her own. How can anyone "write" these intense happenings?

The question is not of "catching" the memories in writing (precisely the stupidity of biographies which can never characterize their literary subject) but of being caught in writing, precisely the absolute surprise of the conchologist in Bachelard's "Shells." The surprised ethos is a rhetorician placed in the (non) reflexive middle where one is caught between the phenomenon of the emerging snail and discursive description of that snail. By being caught (instead of catching) one is disposed to an activity of writing passively. A paradoxical non-position, but that is precisely the point. Working outside of the self, "It Was" (the happenings) are allowed to emerge as they forcefully emerge into/out of one's memory. This is, I think, the rhetorical paradox of Woolf's memory-happening/happening-memory. I would suggest that we can read "A Sketch of the Past" as 1) an un-writing of the auto-biographical tradition (on another plane Nietzsche is doing something similar in Ecce Homo) and 2) the practice of auto-biography, i.e. the biography that writes itself in which the author is discursively dissolved in the process of writing. In her sensitivity Woolf, spots the dangerous of characterization present in the auto/biographical genre of writing, and if she is going to characterize herself she must write outside of the self, create a wandering and nomadic characterization never settled on a complete character. In this sense "A Sketch of the Past" might then be both novelistic and poetic. It produces a character within a set of memory-happenings/happening-memories like Woolf's novels but also contains a viral-strand of poetic impossibility, i.e. the impossibility of writing which drives Woolf to write: "by writing I doing what is far more necessary than anything else" (73). This impossibility is both the impossibility of writing it all down (naturally), but also the impossibility of stopping. It is not the impossibility of catching the object (we have jettisoned that rhetorical/philosophical project), but the impossibility of fully absorbing the intensely given phenomena of the memory-writing Event which still exists, haunts us and pursues us through the corridors of life.

Works Cited
Vitanza, Victor J. Sexual Violence in Western Thought And Writing: Chaste Rape.
White, Eric Charles. Kaironomia.


P.S. Sorry this is late, Dr. Sparks! I too have been terribly sick since Friday and have been playing catch up all week on my work.

Seduction, Lover's Discourse, and Leith Hill in Mrs. Dalloway

Two texts inform my readings of "seduction" in respect to Mrs. Dalloway against [along side] Benjamin Hagen's interpretation in "A Car, a Plane, and a Tower: Interrogating Public Images in Mrs.
Dalloway." The precise difference to how I think seduction should be read, based on these two theoretical texts, drives me to the private if not the totally secluded space of an incontestable interior. That is not a space of agency, of will, or of desire, and therefore is a space in which there is not only no recourse for resistance but also no need for resistance. The activity in this space is the duel, per Baudrillard in Seduction and the space is that of Roland Barthe's A Lover's Discourse.

It is one thing to say that the car in Mrs. Dalloway is a screen, a mirror; it is another thing to say that it absorbs, and something quite different to say that it seduces. The mirror absorbs, yes, but Baudrillard writes, "'I'll be your mirror' does not signify 'I'll be your reflection' but 'I'll be your deception. To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion... Narcissus too loses himself in his own illusory image; that is why he turns from his truth, and by his example turns others from their truth - and so becomes a model of love" (69). We forget too easily that seduction has nothing to do with the Good, as the reading Hagen suggests positions Woolf's images of human/technology relationships seducing one another "toward a potential and powerful
resistance" on the part of the (seduced) human agency (549). The whole point of seduction, if there is a "point" is that resistance is suspended - Narcissus does not resist the spectacle in the pool but is wholly deceived by it. Guy Dubord would have us resist this Society of the Spectacle, T - O - F- E, or at least sound the image which "creates a condition of possibility from which one can respond creatively and ethically to changed and changing worlds—" (Hagen, 549). Seduction, for me, bears little attachments to ethics of any sort, which depends on discerning a truth of the image even if with an experimental method as Hagen reads in Woolf. Not that it is a bad idea at all, I just am dissatisfied in calling it "seduction," and I think it is on other grounds that Woolf breaks onto seduction in Mrs. Dalloway.

What I am calling seduction, what I see in Baudrillard, is deceptive but not in the way T-O-F-E is deceptive in the society of the spectacle, which absorbs our subjectivity and threatens to efface them. Yet at the same time seduction does not create a complex of subjectivity (which still necessitates a truth) through the act of absorption (as in the image of the car) and therefore does not play its hand from a lack or a desire which the crowds possess. Seduction is not desire to control or even the desire to deceive, it is the surface of illusion that deceives based in fascination (which cannot be confused with desire). "What does the car want?" - a useful question in its own right, but an irrelevant question if we want to think of seduction.

The passage that motivates me to explore an other possibility for Woolf and seduction more closely aligned with Baudrillard's writing is the duel carried out between Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh. Seduction has everything to do with duel/dual relations, one and another seducing and being seduced, but not in the registers of desire but the registers of a game (the duel). Move and counter move reversing the conversation. Ironic turning of the subject and increase of the stakes of the game. Woolf might characterize this encounter as a duel in the image of the pen knife. Its sudden initiation is predicated on a wager: "she will see me" as Peter challenges Clarissa to see him. The initiation is the beginning of a duel in which both players wager themselves (their reputation, their desires, their past...) and continue upping the ante with each challenge. This is a seductive duel because it turns each character away from their "truth" in that Clarissa's "real" desires for Peter disappear in the course of challenging Peter throughout the conversation. In seduction one does not reveal one's true feelings (nor would an image do so), but rather sacrifices desire in the contest of desire. Peter "proves" his ardent love for the wife of the army major but the truth of which is never the goal. His goal is to out wager Clarissa, to defeat her in a battle of love - Narcissus and image-Narcissus trading glances, amplifying fascination, until one falls into the other. Woolf shows that in this engagement between Clarissa and Peter, despite Peter's "vulgar" victory, it ends in disappearance.

This is, I think, what Woolf might see as the "space" of seduction. Clarissa might say at the end of her conversation "I am engulfed" (Barthes, 11). "[A]ll in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! / It was all over for her" (Woolf, 46). She responds to Peter's challenge by disappearing (ultimately a "victory" since Peter cannot reciprocate the challenge given by Clarissa). Woolf introduces a reminiscence on Leith Hill where in Clarissa disappears as the lover disappears: "the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is 'unreal,' i.e. intractable' (Barthes, 3). Her unreality at this point, ultimately and irreducibly interior, occurs on the private site, "the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously..." (3). This retreat is "retreat" into an unreality of memory as an amorous discourse with oneself. Woolf chooses this place, Leith Hill, to highlight both the "lover's discourse" which Clarissa is seduced in to as well as the seductive duel which seduced her into this discourse outside discourse.

Leith Hill is the the site of a battle (8th century?), and this connection with English history would no doubt resonate with the back and forth, the exposed weapon, the military association with India. The location might serve as a vehicle for Clarissa's lover's discourse within seduction as a duel. Why else might she be reminded of Leith Hill specifically? The view, of course, is perhaps the most obvious reason from a modern perspective. Leith Hill overlooks a vast Surrey landscape from an uncommon height for Southern England. The perspective is removed, "how distant the view had looked," and therefore a perfect image of the lover's discourse already within the lover's discourse of memory. Yet the perspective from Leith Hill also suggests that Clarissa's thoughts are ranging, or better yet, a drift, set a drift by the exchange with Peter, now alone up in the tower of memory overlooking her past, while still present in the room with Peter. A third possibility for Leith Hill could be that it is also the grave of its owner, his empty residence containing "the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds' nests..." The association with death and disappearance further reinforces the idea of Clarissa's removal in response to Peter's challenge(s) but also the figures of space in respect to the lover's discourse, which has no object any longer, which has disappeared from its object like Clarissa who is, she thinks, forever alone.

View to the East (?) from Leith Hill, 2003

Perhaps Woolf cuts off their meeting, more or less, with this image to tie together the notion of seduction and the lover's discourse (intimate but not the same things), and perhaps we could begin thinking of seduction in Woolf's writing not as a way to bolster our sense of cultural change but of sensing, feeling, inhabiting literarily the seductive interactions and intractable distances between human beings.

Spacial Practice in the Post

Letters are probably not the "best" place to begin thinking about space and Woolf. But then there is that passage in Jacob's Room which begins, "Let us consider letters - how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark - for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien..."  and so on for a page or two (96ff). 

Instead of regarding space it seems that letters transcend space, as it were, and provide us with the possibility to ascend the spacial parameters of our everyday lives and to get beyond the space which we ordinarily travel. I write a letter to communicate with a friend to whose location I cannot walk in order to converse. As important as the letter is for communication ("Life would split asunder without them"), it is in its most pragmatic mode a means of negating the material realities of language in space (voices) with a technology founded on a strategic allotment of space ("strategic" in de Certeau's sense), i.e. postal codes, addresses, etc. Yet although the letter becomes part of the abstract postal-machine ("immortalized by the postmark...") and in that sense loses the vivacity of spoken language as in conversation between friends ("The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice of the scowl"), it nonetheless undergoes a journey. The letter moves through space, even if it is conceived as a strategic space, a map. Or rather, I think it might be better to conceive of the letter as moving between spaces. Letters "come at breakfast..." from where?

Woolf writes that letters are written "pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses round a bright red cave)" (97). Letter writing is common in Jacob's Room. It opens with Mrs. Flanders writing a letter on the beach in Cornwall, a specific location. Jacob keeps his mother's letters in his pocket, a particular kind of place of its own. Letters are written, sent, received, read. Transition, movement is implicit in the business of touching other's souls, and therefore space is essential for understanding the Letter as well as the person, so to speak. "Jacob's letters are so like him..." (137). What is less important is how the letter gets there, what space it traverses, only if it does or does not. It is less important  to understand where the letter was actually written if we can suppose that all letters are written in that same "bright red cave," perhaps the human heart. What matters is that the letter moves. It may not form part of the spatial practice the way walking does, which makes space according to de Certeau through expansion and fragmentation (synecdoche and asyndeton), yet the letter nonetheless is a spacial practice which exempts the sender and receiver from the experience of travel in space (the walking, the driving, the train, etc.) but maintains if not accentuates, perhaps painfully, another experience of space: time. Letters mark a duration necessitated by a movement through space which has disappeared as a referent. Sending letters as spacial practice (as opposed to something purely discursive), is what makes the letter an alien object: "and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves lying on the table" (96). The letter is a "personality" attempting to reach another "personality" across spaces, leaving behind one space for another, a space in which "it" did not originate. The letter has wandered from its birthplace, and this wandering is not unlike walking except that we only perceive it as a phantom walking. It may zig-zag its way to the address, changing as it travels invisibly through space, which is to say changing a personality while that person remains sedentary - travel without traveling.

If sending letters does constitute a kind of spacial practice un/like de Certeau's concept of walking as spacial practice, how could this help us weave in and out of Woolf's use of letters and letter writing in Jacob's Room? It may be as tangled and incomplete a thread as Mrs. Flander's attempts to write letters (never quite finishing the sentence it seems), but with the consistency with which letters and letter writing is broached in the novel, and the poignancy which the practice takes on between the characters as they themselves move in and out, I think it can only prove to be a useful and stimulating line of theoretical inquiry into the novel as a whole.