Eleanor McNees points out in her introduction to The Years (Harcourt: 2008) the struggles Woolf endured in creating the novel from the earlier novel-essay version, The Pargiters.The gulf between criticism and creativity in many ways defined that struggle which ultimately resulted in the division of The Pargiters into The Years and Three Guineas. McNees also brings up Woolf's conflict with the distinction between what Woolf called the "materialists" and the "spiritualists" (xlix), i.e. those who set their readers among the opacity of objects and those who set their readers in the mind only dealing with objects as they were phenomena which affected the mind. Since both of these dichotomies played into Woolf's creative process for the novel we might be tempted to imagine that The Years is simply the creative side and Three Guineas is the critical side of her thought, however I think it is best to complicate these dichotomies with a third term as I believe Woolf does with The Years. The third term I have in mind is "making" as it comes from Aristotle's famous division of human activity: knowing, making, doing (something we are quite partial to in RCID, of course!).
The reason I think we should read The Years as an effort in "making" by Woolf and not in "knowing" (criticism) or simply "doing" (possibly pure creativity without criticism) is because of the idea of conversations. Although, I almost disagree with McNees that Woolf's is a synthesis approach (l) since "making" can come before the binary criticism/creativity. McNees brings up several facts concerning Woolf, The Years, and conversations. First, the novel has more conversations than any of Woolf's other novels (xlvi). Second, McNees points us to an address Woolf delivered to the London National Society for Women's Services where she said "there will be a place between you and someone else the most interesting exciting and important conversation there has ever been" (Woolf, xlvi). Third, the novel ends with an opening door, which McNees suggests is an invitation for the reader to imagine the conversations that will be had with some interlocutor. I think it is also important, for reading The Years as an effort in "making," to recall that one "makes conversation." One cannot plan a conversation as one can plan criticism (a conversation can be derailed quickly), nor is a conversation something you "do" but something that is produced (made) through interaction. Conversations are always made within the presence of two or more persons and without the need for either the exactness of criticism or the directed vigor of activity. None of this is to say that conversations are not productive, and I think that Woolf understood the advantage which an effort in making (conversing) would allow her both in terms of thinking and doing. By making a novel (an attempt at conversation) the idea is that Woolf better disposes her readers to begin thinking and acting not upon truths or precepts but from conversations. Making, in its turn, leads to more thinking and doing while avoiding the perceived pitfalls of a purely critical approach or a purely activist approach. Making opens doors that knowing or doing never can, and that, I cannot help but think, is highly important for Woolf in The Years. Woolf recognizes that it is making is what creates that place "between" us and someone else where the most interesting conversations take place.
I also think the importance of making (prior to but not excluding knowing or doing) is essential for understanding Woolf's view of language. "Making" is precisely the idea behind "Craftsmanship," wherein Woolf shows that "Words, then, are not useful" (Craftsmanship) and that words can never approach anything like "truth." Yet she does show us that the power of words lies in their ability to suggest, to echo, to procreate. This, in essence, is Woolf deciding to live in the realm of "making" which is neither criticism or creativity but both - a kind of production from which is produced knowledge and action but without planning. What this means is that Woolf is under no obligation in The Years, or any of her other fiction works, to tell the "truth" or inspire her readers to one particular set of actions. She knows this will happen anyway, as long as she uses words in a particular way special to "making," to craftsmanship. The Years, then, makes a political ethical impact on its readers quite unlike Three Guineas or A Room of One's Own even if it is built on same perspective and deals with the same themes. Its strength lies in the fact that one cannot disagree with The Years as one can disagree with the other two. If one reads The Years (and its many conversations) one may only converse with it, and Woolf, and others. It is a perpetual openness, just as a conversation is always -vulnerable to being broached and rebroached. Rather than claiming the facts of the case or acting upon our impulses we are placed in a position to continually (re)make what Woolf offers us. In this sense, I think The Years makes just as important a political statement for women's rights as Three Guineas even without the critical edge. And I think we can easily imagine this being the case when we consider that it was The Years which won Woolf so much popularity (esp. across the pond) while Three Guineas drew mostly criticism. Neither is a failure, of course, but The Years, as a product that produces by virtue of its rhetorical composition, deserves its own praise as an attempt to inspire more conversations, always more conversations, which lead to change in their own way, often in ways we do not expect. This might lend some alternative emphasis to Eleanor's final lines "And now?" (Woolf, 412). What now? After The Years, what shall we talk about?
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Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Mark Hussey ed. Harcourt: 2008.
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