Postmodern Woolf

Rebecca Stephens

English Department
Carlow College

 

Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

 

Pamela L. Caughie’s Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself is a sustained and perhaps ruthless attack on dualism in Woolf scholarship. As an answer to Toril Moi’s call in Sexual/Textual Politics for a text-based, anti-humanist approach to Woolf’s writings, the book explores new alternatives in an area of scholarship not known for keeping pace with postmodern critical theory and practice. Nearly any effort in this direction is welcome. Yet, as its and title suggests and its oppositional stance confirms, this study embraces–and ultimately fails to overcome–a dualism of its own, thus raising questions about its value and success as a postmodern intervention.

 

For Caughie the insistence upon choosing between dualisms–fact/fiction, surface/depth, form/content, art/politics, for example–has brought Woolf scholarship to a critical impasse. She proposes the alternative of a postmodern approach, one which displaces these oppositions into new contexts, and which acknowledges a change in “aesthetic motivation” (xiii). Unlike the aesthetic motivation within modernism, which “placed itself at the vanguard of culture,” the postmodern version “explores the relations between literary practices and social practices” (xiii). Caughie does not claim to classify Woolf in one tradition or another; rather, she seeks to read Woolf’s writings in the light of postmodernism, that is, with new perspectives available in the wake of recent artistic and critical innovations.

 

When she works within this broadly conceived plan, Caughie offers thoughtful and original readings of specific works. The readings of Woolf’s critical writings in Chapter 6, for example, succeed in moving beyond dualism to the new kinds of relationships which characterize postmodern reading and writing strategies. Woolf’s focus upon the process of reading, as exemplified in “Phases of Fiction,” “Granite and Rainbow,” and the two Common Reader collections, demonstrates for Caughie the interaction of text, world and reader. Rather than propose a new canon or tradition, an oppositional tactic, Woolf explores in these writings the relations which arise when a writer and reader enter, by mutual consent, a certain “reality.” Woolf’s critical practice thus considers “what we are consenting to and how our consent is achieved” (176). This practice in effect narrates Woolf’s admittedly impressionistic and wildly contradictory reading process. Its logic lies in its narrative experimentation, not in conclusions drawn or traditions outlined. In fact, Woolf’s story of reading undermines any thought of historical progression or development of fiction, confirming the situational relations between writer and reader at any given time. And the “common reader,” often thought of as Woolf’s response to the Oxbridge tradition from which she was excluded, becomes for Caughie not a less trained reader, but a kind of reading relation. Common for her suggests the communal.

 

Flush, both the novel and the dog, enact Caughie’s postmodern conception of value formation. The novel is not only an example of artistic waste or playful excess, it must also be reckoned with as a marketable commodity. Caughie cites Woolf’s diary in support of the latter “function” of the text: “to stem the ruin we shall suffer from the failure of The Waves” (qtd. in Caughie 149). Drawing support from the dog’s variable and context-dependent views of its own value, Caughie calls the novel an “allegory of canon formation and canonical value” (146). Woolf’s shifting responses to the work, from playfulness to irony to detachment and scorn, together with a similar spectrum of public and critical reaction over the years, lead Caughie to question the economy of value and canon formation which informs our readings of Flush and other literary works.

 

A collection of readings like these could work through the critical impasse that Caughie cites and open a number of new possibilities for reading Woolf. Yet Caughie subverts her own efforts by setting them in opposition to existing scholarship. This practice creates a dualism between traditional and postmodern approaches to Woolf, reproducing precisely the binary, oppositional logic her postmodernist readings are supposed to displace.

 

Caughie’s dualism parallels a distinction which she makes in her conclusion between Elaine Showalter’s and Jane Gallop’s approaches to a feminist critical practice. While Showalter seeks to define such concepts as double-voiced discourse, Gallop enacts her practice by reading texts against each other. Caughie seems to favor the latter approach, and the readings I have described succeed in enacting or performing her idea of the postmodern. At the same time, the confrontation with traditional Woolf scholars established in the introduction leaves enough traces of the Showalter strategy to embroil Caughie in the practices with which she takes issue. By calling her readings “corrective,” she keeps the opposition alive.

 

As a result, it is easy to lose sight of the clean elegance with which Caughie describes her project in the preface. As she takes to task the major figures in Woolf scholarship (particuarly Jane Marcus) for their referential, essentialist connections, Caughie works against her initial reluctance to summarize or define the postmodern. She draws upon a number of postmodern fiction writers, as well as the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Barbara Hernstein Smith and Kenneth Burke. Wittgenstein empowers Caughie’s challenge to the correspondence theory of language, the opposition of form and content which views discourse as a transparent container for ideas. Caughie suggests that Woolf views art as Wittgenstein views language: as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among discursive strategies, rather than as a configuration or tradition based upon “empirical stability.” A brief mention of Rorty’s pragmatics and Burke’s transactional view of writer/reader relations leads Caughie to consider the “function” of a text, that is, how it produces meaning and finds its audience. Hernstein Smith brings Caughie’s theoretical framework closer to the narrative strategies upon which the first few readings focus. For Smith, narrative strategies are a function of varying critical perspectives, not essential characteristics of a certain text or genre. Under this view, Caughie suggests that “we can approach narrative strategies not as representations of a certain set of conditions, such as women’s lives or consumer society, but as functions of ‘multiple interacting conditions'” (18). Free of absolute reference to conventions or traditions, narrative experimentation becomes the given for Woolf: “Her fiction works on the assumption that narrative activity preceded any understanding of self and world” (67).

 

The reader who abstracts a summary such as this fails to participate in the “shared way of behaving toward narratives based upon shared assumptions about language use” which characterizes Caughie’s postmodern perspective. Having risked lapsing into the essentialism that Caughie opposes, however, the reader will also note the thinness of the thread with which this postmodernism is woven. One can hardly disagree with any of her broad and abstract statements; yet together they offer no coherent perspective or methodology. And rather than elaborating the theoretical program through detailed close readings, Caughie merely reiterates the terms of her broad “postmodern” polemic against what she considers to be traditional views of the individual works. The words “function,” “motive” and “relations” become a kind of refrain or mantra throughout the book.

 

The result of this practice is a series of brief and blurry close-ups of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own. A chapter on the artist figure displaces the art/life opposition into a context-dependent quest to test a number of new relations. Under such a reading Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse becomes the narrator of the production of art as well as the artist, and in this capacity affirms the continuing process of creating. The multifaceted “I” in A Room of One’s Own undermines the stable self that can be separated structurally or empirically from its creative processes. Rather than defining a feminine alternative to modernist art, this protean speaker is “testing out the implications of the concept of art and self developed in . . . To the Lighthouse and Orlando” (42). The multiple consciousness of The Waves shifts the crucial relationship from art/life to art/audience, suggesting, with Bernard, that “‘All is experiment and adventure” (50).

 

These readings place Woolf’s writings in a postmodern context of “multiple interacting conditions” by ignoring the fact that Woolf and her narrators repeatedly contemplate the truth or the essence of their lives and creative efforts. Even as she returns to the Ramsay’s summer house to complete her painting, Lily considers the “meaning of life.” Bernard’s observations on storytelling do not necessarily challenge the referential nature of this process. His comment that “Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it” (qtd. by Caughie 50) falls short of a metadiscursive or enlarging displacement of the life/art dichotomy as it points toward a transcendent dimension of life. To be convincing, Caughie’s concept of “multiple interacting conditions” must be extended to address these thoughts and statements as well. Formalist observations, such as naming Lily as narrator, or pointing out (not for the first time) the unstable narrative perspective of Jacob’s Room, can (and have) effectively argued for the dichotomy of art and life which Caughie seeks to disrupt.

 

The multiplicity of meanings attributed to truth and reality in Woolf’s writings continues to draw critical attention, not all of which is as polarized as Caughie suggests. Herself unwilling to relinquish “reality” fully to the status of textual and discursive phenomena, Caughie reminds us of the challenge Woolf offers to postmodern critical theory. Yet a comparative reading of The Years and Night and Day lands Caughie in the same essentializing and polarizing camp that she disparages. For her the concern in Night and Day with objects and relics of the past produces a world of substance and a narrative of authority and reference. The uncertainty of narrative structures in The Years (echoing voices, lack of centering perspectives) expresses the postmodern concern for self-reflexive attention to discursive relations. The problem is not simply a matter of Caughie’s lapse into dualism, although it is curious that her broad conception of postmodern narrative relations cannot gain even a toehold upon Night and Day. (The novel’s playful experimentation with metaphor, reference and perspective might easily be worked into Caughie’s “postmodernism.”) Rather, the referentiality which Caughie locates in Night and Day sends a ripple of alarm back upon all of her readings, suggesting that Woolf’s texts may generally leave room for a greater degree of attachment to the ideas of stable object and transcendent subject than Caughie has let on.

 

Caughie’s view of Woolf’s critical reading strategies might be read back upon her own critical method. This book contains many pointed attacks on representationalist readings of Woolf, but it rarely conveys a sense of what Caughie calls “multiple reading relations.” Perhaps generalizing too readily from her own “motives” (one of her key terms), Caughie seems to assume the primacy of literary- critical or literary-theoretical concerns for the critics she opposes. The briefest contact with the Woolf scholarly community dispels such an assumption. A group of affiliated and unaffiliated scholars representing numerous academic disciplines, Woolf’s readers most often seek to recreate and preserve her image as a woman, a feminist, or an historical/cultural icon. Susan Squier’s readings of Flush as a story of marginalization, and of the London essays as the reflection of a woman’s life in a patriarchal society, reveal these sorts of motives. In unfolding her own (equally plausible) reading of Flush, and her analysis of the multiple and shifting perspectives of the London Scene essays, Caughie achieves about the same level of dialogue with critics like Squier as that which takes place between Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir. Caughie’s confrontationalism thus not only undermines her theoretical commitment to a non-dualist practice of reading, but leaves her readings unnecessarily isolated within the active field of Woolf studies. Combined with the sweeping claim of the book’s title, this mode of critical procedure risks further alienating an already skeptical scholarly community as regards postmodern criticism in general.

 

As the first effort of its kind, however, this book deserves the attention and the response of Woolf scholars. Caughie observes, rightly, that it is not a book which can serve as an introduction either to Virginia Woolf or to postmodernism. But for scholars with an established stake in either or both of these fields, it does have much to offer. For those who choose to give Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism a chance, I would like to suggest, by way of conclusion (and with apologies to Cortazar), an alternate reading sequence: Begin with the preface, then read Chapter Five, Chapter Six, and the conclusion before returning to the introduction and Chapters One through Four. This particular hopscotch might better capture the strength of Caughie’s postmodern performances–or at least render them more congenial to resistant readers.