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Die schmale Brücke der Kunst.
Essay
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
107 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
3 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,907 books29.1k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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January 30, 2023Reviewed in 2014
I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions lately, questions related to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of prose.
Recent books, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, José Saramago’s The Elephant's Journey, and particularly, Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling left me a little confused about how to categorise them, left me searching through my reading experience for examples of similar prose styles, prose that rises "high from the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles", prose that had been "written standing back from life, because in that way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it", prose that "can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle of labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper is to be heard", prose that can "chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror, or praise the rose, the nightingale, or the beauty of the night", prose that basically holds "little kinship with the sociological novel".
If I use Virginia Woolf’s words to describe what I was searching for, it is not only because they are perfectly phrased but because of the irony of the situation in which I’ve placed them. I’ve used them to refer to the prose style of books written from the 1960s onwards even while her words come to us from the early decades of the twentieth century, long before these books were written. But the most extraordinary aspect of what she is doing here is the fact that she is describing a prose style unknown in her own time, one she feels will be the only means to cross the narrow bridge between poetry and prose, one capable of allowing us to deal with both the "doubt and conflict" of the modern age, "an age where beauty is part ugliness, amusement part disgust, pleasure part pain."
Reading Marguerite Young had inspired me with similar thoughts about beauty and its underside. Virginia Woolf addresses this idea: "There trips along by the side of our modern beauty some mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows that the other cheek is pitted and deformed." Woolf goes on to explain how she would have these contradictions best expressed: in a prose style that would become the new poetry. She believed that the age of the dramatic lyrical poem, or "poetic play" was over and needed to be replaced by writing that would "have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose", that would describe "the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams." It is almost as if she had conjured up Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from her own imagination; I only regretted that I could not read her thoughts on that book and see if it corresponded with her vision.
As I read through this slim essay, my mind racing as I came upon more and more parallels between her words and my own reading experience, can you imagine my pleasure when she finished by describing one of my favourite books, one written long before her time but which she believes might most closely epitomise the prose style that she is calling for. Yes, none other than The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, whose author, "standing a little aloof, lays his hands lightly on imagination, wit, fantasy; and reaching high up among the branches where these things grow, naturally and no doubt willingly forfeits his right to the more substantial vegetables that grow on the ground. For unfortunately, it seems true that some renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind, or you will drop them midstream or, what is worse, overbalance and be drowned yourself".
I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions lately, questions related to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of prose.
Recent books, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, José Saramago’s The Elephant's Journey, and particularly, Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling left me a little confused about how to categorise them, left me searching through my reading experience for examples of similar prose styles, prose that rises "high from the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles", prose that had been "written standing back from life, because in that way a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it", prose that "can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle of labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper is to be heard", prose that can "chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror, or praise the rose, the nightingale, or the beauty of the night", prose that basically holds "little kinship with the sociological novel".
If I use Virginia Woolf’s words to describe what I was searching for, it is not only because they are perfectly phrased but because of the irony of the situation in which I’ve placed them. I’ve used them to refer to the prose style of books written from the 1960s onwards even while her words come to us from the early decades of the twentieth century, long before these books were written. But the most extraordinary aspect of what she is doing here is the fact that she is describing a prose style unknown in her own time, one she feels will be the only means to cross the narrow bridge between poetry and prose, one capable of allowing us to deal with both the "doubt and conflict" of the modern age, "an age where beauty is part ugliness, amusement part disgust, pleasure part pain."
Reading Marguerite Young had inspired me with similar thoughts about beauty and its underside. Virginia Woolf addresses this idea: "There trips along by the side of our modern beauty some mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows that the other cheek is pitted and deformed." Woolf goes on to explain how she would have these contradictions best expressed: in a prose style that would become the new poetry. She believed that the age of the dramatic lyrical poem, or "poetic play" was over and needed to be replaced by writing that would "have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose", that would describe "the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams." It is almost as if she had conjured up Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from her own imagination; I only regretted that I could not read her thoughts on that book and see if it corresponded with her vision.
As I read through this slim essay, my mind racing as I came upon more and more parallels between her words and my own reading experience, can you imagine my pleasure when she finished by describing one of my favourite books, one written long before her time but which she believes might most closely epitomise the prose style that she is calling for. Yes, none other than The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, whose author, "standing a little aloof, lays his hands lightly on imagination, wit, fantasy; and reaching high up among the branches where these things grow, naturally and no doubt willingly forfeits his right to the more substantial vegetables that grow on the ground. For unfortunately, it seems true that some renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind, or you will drop them midstream or, what is worse, overbalance and be drowned yourself".
July 29, 2014
Fionnuala's and Stephen's Reviews
Thank you to Fionnuala and Stephen for drawing attention to this essay.
Fionnuala's review describes wonderfully how Woolf's words reflect her current reading concerns:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Stephen's reveals a lifetime of reflection on these issues:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I'll Be Your Mirror, Reflect What You Are
One of the qualities of great literature (at least, that which is written in an open, rather than a closed, manner) is that sometimes it can be a mirror into which we look and see ourselves from a different perspective.
Because we see ourselves, reflected, there is no guarantee that what we see will be identical to what another reader sees. In fact, it can be quite the opposite, it's almost as if it's guaranteed that what we see will not be identical.
Nobody's Doing It
Woolf's essay isn't so much a prescription as to how fiction should be written. It is more a lament about what she feels is missing from the fiction of her day (1927).
Like other critics, she looks backwards to the past for guidance, but she acknowledges this isn't enough. Mostly she is looking forwards to the future.
She says, this needs to be done. But few seem to be doing it.
In fact, she goes further and says, it used to be done, but it isn't any longer being done. She gives as her examples from the past Laurence Sterne and William Shakespeare. She has an enormous respect for the whole Elizabethan era.
Woolf doesn't mandate that everybody write fiction like this. Far from being normative, she implies that at least somebody should do it, and if nobody else does it, well at least in my opinion, she could justifiably say that she did it.
Towards a Definition of Modernism
So what is it that Woolf is talking about?
I suspect she is giving us a taste of her definition of what we would subsequently call Modernism, even if she didn't use that word in her essay. However, she also gives us enough understanding of the potential of Modernism to understand why I argue elsewhere that Postmodernism is not a separate movement to Modernism, but in fact a subset or branch of it with similar concerns.
In effect, I would argue that Modernism is any art that seeks to go beyond mere Realism in form and content.
The Context of Modernism
First, Woolf describes the age she was living in:
"It is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves."
Society and history are fluid. We don't know in what direction or directions they are heading.
Equally, we ourselves, individuals, are fluid. We no longer have certainty about what constitutes the Self:
"The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one's fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist."
An Attitude Towards Life
In this last paragraph, Woolf identifies both the problem and, perhaps, the solution.
The old certainties of religion, science and political authority have been undermined. Order has given way to disorder, structure to chaos.
This affects what she calls our our attitude towards life:
"an attitude which is full of contrast and collision; an attitude which seems to demand the conflict of one character upon another, and at the same time to stand in need of some general shaping power, some conception which lends the whole harmony and force..."
Then she describes people in terms that many of us can relate to today:
"We all know people — if we turn from literature to life for a moment — who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle whence they see everything askew."
It's identical language to the world that contemporary critics describe when they contextualise Post-Modernism. Only Woolf illustrates that this attitude has existed in the past, during her age, during the Elizabethan era, and probably during all periods of intellectual foment in history.
"The Perfectly Elastic Envelope"
Ironically, despite the questioning of the integrity of the Self, Woolf believes that the solution comes from the imposition of some type of "control", what she implies might be a new "anchor".
For all our weaknesses and flaws, we have to create our own anchor.
It seems pretty clear that Woolf thinks that the anchor is art or fiction.
She describes literature, or at least poetry, as "a great channel of expression".
In the past, the harmony and force came from the likes of the poetic drama of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is one of her two exemplars:
"Shakespeare's plays are not the work of a baffled and frustrated mind; they are the perfectly elastic envelope of his thought. Without a hitch, he turns from philosophy to a drunken brawl; from love songs to an argument; from simply merriment to profound speculation."
It is a creative world rich in form and content. It is a world of complete freedom, which she also finds encapsulated in the "looseness and freedom of 'Tristram Shandy'".
"That Queer Conglomeration of Incongruous Things"
The creative world of Realism is not enough to explore Woolf's concerns. She thinks we need a reinvention and reinvigoration of literature that can go beyond the psychology of its protagonists:
"We long for some more impersonal relationship. We long for ideas, for dreams, for imaginations, for poetry.
"It will give the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams. But it will also give the sneer, the contrast, the question, the closeness and complexity of life. It will take the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things — the modern mind. Therefore it will clasp to its breast the precious prerogatives of the democratic art of prose; its freedom, its fearlessness, its flexibility."
Woolf adds, "it is one of the glories of the Elizabethan dramatists that they give us this."
If they could do it, it can still be done, both in 1927 and now.
"That Cannibal, the Novel"
The advocates of Post-Modernism often discuss it in terms of its appropriation of the past. Woolf uses the same language in defining an agenda for her nouvelle novel or Modernism. She anticipates prose taking over the role previously performed by poetry and drama:
"That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art, will by then have devoured even more."
Life is rich, and it calls on a parallel richness in the way we experience and process it:
"Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it."
"Full Play Upon Important Things"
This essay then was Woolf's manifesto for a new, additional way of writing.
It's exciting to read it today, not just because of what it proposes, but because of what she and others delivered and continue to deliver:
"It is certain that there are scattered about in England, France, and America writers who are trying to work themselves free from a bondage which has become irksome to them; writers who are trying to readjust their attitude so that they may once more stand easily and naturally in a position where their powers have full play upon important things.
"And it is when a book strikes us as the result of that attitude rather than by its beauty or its brilliancy that we know that it has in it the seeds of an enduring existence."
More power to the endurance of the literature Woolf foresaw!
Thank you to Fionnuala and Stephen for drawing attention to this essay.
Fionnuala's review describes wonderfully how Woolf's words reflect her current reading concerns:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Stephen's reveals a lifetime of reflection on these issues:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I'll Be Your Mirror, Reflect What You Are
One of the qualities of great literature (at least, that which is written in an open, rather than a closed, manner) is that sometimes it can be a mirror into which we look and see ourselves from a different perspective.
Because we see ourselves, reflected, there is no guarantee that what we see will be identical to what another reader sees. In fact, it can be quite the opposite, it's almost as if it's guaranteed that what we see will not be identical.
Nobody's Doing It
Woolf's essay isn't so much a prescription as to how fiction should be written. It is more a lament about what she feels is missing from the fiction of her day (1927).
Like other critics, she looks backwards to the past for guidance, but she acknowledges this isn't enough. Mostly she is looking forwards to the future.
She says, this needs to be done. But few seem to be doing it.
In fact, she goes further and says, it used to be done, but it isn't any longer being done. She gives as her examples from the past Laurence Sterne and William Shakespeare. She has an enormous respect for the whole Elizabethan era.
Woolf doesn't mandate that everybody write fiction like this. Far from being normative, she implies that at least somebody should do it, and if nobody else does it, well at least in my opinion, she could justifiably say that she did it.
Towards a Definition of Modernism
So what is it that Woolf is talking about?
I suspect she is giving us a taste of her definition of what we would subsequently call Modernism, even if she didn't use that word in her essay. However, she also gives us enough understanding of the potential of Modernism to understand why I argue elsewhere that Postmodernism is not a separate movement to Modernism, but in fact a subset or branch of it with similar concerns.
In effect, I would argue that Modernism is any art that seeks to go beyond mere Realism in form and content.
The Context of Modernism
First, Woolf describes the age she was living in:
"It is an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves."
Society and history are fluid. We don't know in what direction or directions they are heading.
Equally, we ourselves, individuals, are fluid. We no longer have certainty about what constitutes the Self:
"The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one's fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist."
An Attitude Towards Life
In this last paragraph, Woolf identifies both the problem and, perhaps, the solution.
The old certainties of religion, science and political authority have been undermined. Order has given way to disorder, structure to chaos.
This affects what she calls our our attitude towards life:
"an attitude which is full of contrast and collision; an attitude which seems to demand the conflict of one character upon another, and at the same time to stand in need of some general shaping power, some conception which lends the whole harmony and force..."
Then she describes people in terms that many of us can relate to today:
"We all know people — if we turn from literature to life for a moment — who are at loggerheads with existence; unhappy people who never get what they want; are baffled, complaining, who stand at an uncomfortable angle whence they see everything askew."
It's identical language to the world that contemporary critics describe when they contextualise Post-Modernism. Only Woolf illustrates that this attitude has existed in the past, during her age, during the Elizabethan era, and probably during all periods of intellectual foment in history.
"The Perfectly Elastic Envelope"
Ironically, despite the questioning of the integrity of the Self, Woolf believes that the solution comes from the imposition of some type of "control", what she implies might be a new "anchor".
For all our weaknesses and flaws, we have to create our own anchor.
It seems pretty clear that Woolf thinks that the anchor is art or fiction.
She describes literature, or at least poetry, as "a great channel of expression".
In the past, the harmony and force came from the likes of the poetic drama of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare is one of her two exemplars:
"Shakespeare's plays are not the work of a baffled and frustrated mind; they are the perfectly elastic envelope of his thought. Without a hitch, he turns from philosophy to a drunken brawl; from love songs to an argument; from simply merriment to profound speculation."
It is a creative world rich in form and content. It is a world of complete freedom, which she also finds encapsulated in the "looseness and freedom of 'Tristram Shandy'".
"That Queer Conglomeration of Incongruous Things"
The creative world of Realism is not enough to explore Woolf's concerns. She thinks we need a reinvention and reinvigoration of literature that can go beyond the psychology of its protagonists:
"We long for some more impersonal relationship. We long for ideas, for dreams, for imaginations, for poetry.
"It will give the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams. But it will also give the sneer, the contrast, the question, the closeness and complexity of life. It will take the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things — the modern mind. Therefore it will clasp to its breast the precious prerogatives of the democratic art of prose; its freedom, its fearlessness, its flexibility."
Woolf adds, "it is one of the glories of the Elizabethan dramatists that they give us this."
If they could do it, it can still be done, both in 1927 and now.
"That Cannibal, the Novel"
The advocates of Post-Modernism often discuss it in terms of its appropriation of the past. Woolf uses the same language in defining an agenda for her nouvelle novel or Modernism. She anticipates prose taking over the role previously performed by poetry and drama:
"That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art, will by then have devoured even more."
Life is rich, and it calls on a parallel richness in the way we experience and process it:
"Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it."
"Full Play Upon Important Things"
This essay then was Woolf's manifesto for a new, additional way of writing.
It's exciting to read it today, not just because of what it proposes, but because of what she and others delivered and continue to deliver:
"It is certain that there are scattered about in England, France, and America writers who are trying to work themselves free from a bondage which has become irksome to them; writers who are trying to readjust their attitude so that they may once more stand easily and naturally in a position where their powers have full play upon important things.
"And it is when a book strikes us as the result of that attitude rather than by its beauty or its brilliancy that we know that it has in it the seeds of an enduring existence."
More power to the endurance of the literature Woolf foresaw!
July 15, 2025
Vsi eseji o književnosti in pisanju v tej zbirki so topster
January 25, 2025
"It is as if the modern mind, wishing always to verify its emotions, had lost the power of
accepting anything simply for what it is."
accepting anything simply for what it is."
May 14, 2010
In den meisten der ausgewählten Essays geht es um die Abgrenzung der neuen Art von Literatur, zu deren Autoren Woolf selbst gehört. Dabei teilt sie zum einen nicht schlecht gegen die Traditionalisten, die sie mal Materialisten, mal Edwardianer nennt, aus und meint damit insbesondere Wells, Benning und Galsworthy. Andererseits macht sie keinen Hehl aus ihre Bewunderung für Defoe, Austen, Hardy und viele andere.
Auch finden sich hier die bekannten Essays zu Frauen, aber auch eine Abhandlung zum Stummfilm und eine eher private Geschichte über ihren Vater Leslie Stephen.
Ärgerlich dagegen ist das Nachwort von einem gewissen Wolfgang Wicht, der in typischer DDR-Manier Virginia und ihren Vater fast zu sozialistischen Verbündeten macht.
Auch finden sich hier die bekannten Essays zu Frauen, aber auch eine Abhandlung zum Stummfilm und eine eher private Geschichte über ihren Vater Leslie Stephen.
Ärgerlich dagegen ist das Nachwort von einem gewissen Wolfgang Wicht, der in typischer DDR-Manier Virginia und ihren Vater fast zu sozialistischen Verbündeten macht.
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