Professor Dame Hermione Lee - Virginia Woolf, Eccentricity, and the Essay

hello my talk is called virginia woolf eccentricity and essay writing virginia woolf wrote an essay in 1919 called the eccentrics you might not want to have your whole life summed up by that word she says but suggests that perhaps after all there is something to be said for the eccentrics the essay was written at a time when in her mid-30s she was thinking about what she called obscure lives delivering her second novel night and day with great anxiety and publishing one of her first experimental sketches cue kew gardens that is she was still finding her way as a writer though determined to find a completely new way of writing she was extremely anxious not to be thought of as a literary eccentric she was acutely aware no one could be more so of the thin and perilous line between originality and incoherence inventiveness and madness he preferred to be called a genius than an eccentric and was always pleased if her friends told her she was one both words were used of her in her lifetime in the essay wolf says that if you want to be in the dictionary of national biography or to die a dean or a professor a hero or a prime minister then you can't be an eccentric a choice of eccentrics mostly women are people who aren't in public office or have grand careers or distinctions they are the failures the oddities the misfits the obscure they might have committed a nuisance in a public place they don't get biographies written about them they creep in by the back door into other people's biographies they they creep in by the back door into other people's biography it's like the hero's uncle john with his passion for the baptismal right or his aunt i forget her name who knew for certain that the world is shaped like a starfish they're the opposite of the solid and the serviceable they are often disheveled and in des abi from their long obscurity and fantastic behavior she says they call for a new kind of biographical writing above all never for a moment do they believe themselves to be eccentric her examples include lady hester stanhope margaret fuller julia margaret cameron and margaret duchess of newcastle the duchess was one of her candidates in a diary entry for 19th of january 1915 for a possible book of eccentrics wolfe writes about her again in an essay of 1925 called the duchess of newcastle where her eccentricity much ridiculed by others in her lifetime is described affectionately as having something noble and quixotic and high-spirited as well as crack-brained and bird-witted about it wolf notes a fellow feeling for the duchess shown by the romantic essay is charles lamb one of wolff's own favorite writers and a key figure in the link that i'm proposing to make between eccentricity and essay writing in wolf nobody calls wolf an eccentric anymore she outgrew that risk through time and i suspect that the types of people that were labeled the eccentrics by wolf are no longer to be found at least among women perhaps historical changes in the women's movement in the status of women in more freedoms of behavior and self-expression since the early to mid 20th century have made the term less relevant or applicable to unusual or odd kinds of behavior women writers and artists who might have used eccentricity in the past as something of a mask or a ploy a cover or a defense of lesbianism a means of surviving or making their mark as writers in a male dominated literary marketplace no longer need to do so but the word is still in use very often applied to physical habits ways of talking and quirks of personal behavior rather than to a literary style sometimes the meaning is that someone is harmlessly weird odd or peculiar the guardian quick crossword the other day gave eccentric as a clue and the answer was dotty sometimes it's used to suggest a rich idiosyncratic inner life a 1999 novel by anita bruckner undue influence begins with the sentence it is my conviction that everyone is profoundly eccentric the narrator goes on to say that the normal looking people she sees on her way to work are probably harboring unimaginable fantasies but most people are entirely inconsistent we do still find the term applied to certain literary figures but often now with admiration uh or interest rather than scorn or disbelief for instance to the poet stevie smith or christopher smart when used of writers and writing the word eccentric and have associations with melancholy quixotism and vulnerability and also with anash nonsense and exhibitionist idiosyncrasy it is somewhere on the scale between genius and madness it's the opposite of solid and serviceable there's often still an element of mockery or bullying in the use of the term the eccentric is always at the risk of being sidelined mocked eliminated or exterminated one intriguing contemporary application of the word eccentric is in a collection of 2006 called side effects by adam phillips the literary critic essayist and psychoanalyst in an essay in the book which is called talking nonsense and knowing when to stop phillips cites the psychoanalyst anna freud noting in 1968 that the first generation of psychoanalysts were the odd ones the dreamers the neurotics the self-made the eccentrics these types have been eliminated says anna freud since psychoanalytical training became institutionalized and stricter in favor of sober well-prepared professionally efficient types it's very like wolf comparing the eccentric with the solid and the serviceable phillips calls anna freud's words poignantly nostalgic and sees them as a plea for what he calls the incoherent the self-contradictory the nonsensical within the psychoanalytical profession he describes anna freud's wonderful repertory company of the unconventional as the doubters dissatisfied the odd ones the dreamers the neurotics the mentally endangered endangered the eccentrics the self-made and he's talking about the analysts here not the patients in his view such people gave credibility to psychoanalysis has what phillips calls the science of the indeterminate and asks us to wonder what we are doing when we make sense what does this have to do with essay writing well in side effects philips compares the modern literary essay digressive meandering artful inadvertent inconclusive saying things in passing to the things that in his view psychoanalysis needs to pay attention to he says in much modern writing it is the thing said in passing that are the most striking what the writer writes while he is writing something else what the patient happens to say when he is saying what he wants to say what we dream when we are wanting to sleep this is what psychoanalysis wants us to attend to the literary essay as a form at least from the early 19th century onwards has not only allowed for the artfulness the interest of digression but has also positively encouraged it the essays of lamb or hazlitt or emerson create the conditions not unlike a psychiatrical session for concentrations and meanderings the changes of tone and changes of heart over a very small space of time a version of that paragraph is developed by adam phillips in a piece called up to a point the psychoanalyst and the essay which extends that parallel between the curious digressive incomplete form of the essay and what psychoanalysis can do or might be and that piece appears in a recent oxford university press collection called on essays published in 2020 and edited by thomas carson and catherine murphy volume has much to say about what might be called eccentricity in essay writing particularly in the case of wolf and of her great romantic influencer charles lamb thomas karshan in his contribution on wolf's essay street haunting draws many comparisons between wolf's experimental playful questing aggressive essay writing so much taken up with oddities in the grotesque and the essay as practiced by lamb montagna and hazlitt rashan suggests that the essay in the hands of all these writers is i quote a freak of nature a game a joke a whimsy and a hunt felicity james writing brilliantly on charles lamb in this book as an essay writer repeatedly uses words like old strange dark slippery unfamiliar queer and weird he describes lamb's quote mixture of deformity and beauty the familiar and the strange as very influential on wolf and also later on such grotesque melancholy playful and self-referential modern essayists writers such as david foster wallace or nicholson baker i was excited to see these links being made because i've long been haunted by the way in which wolf's essays so riskily and so astonishingly take up the imaginative strangeness of her romantic predecessors in a piece on her essay writing which i wrote for the 2005 cambridge companion on wolf i thought about teresa's performances of loose meandering conversation and i suggested the perils of this for wolf as a narrative strategy talk can go wrong there are many voices in wolf's essays coleridge's among them whose voice is real hopelessly out of control to the verge of incoherence and who end up not having conversations but talking to themselves the danger of coming as close as possible to the talking voice in the form she developed for her essays ran the risks she knew of being too meandering fanciful random but she also knew that aggressive fantastical and fanciful narrative eccentric narrative and make for a powerful seductive and enthralling kind of essay the challenge of the essay as wolff saw it was this never to be yourself and yet always that is the problem that's what she says about the imperative of essay writing in the modern essay 1922. the form requires you to write about yourself or your opinions its aim she says is to make use in literature of yourself but if the essay form is to work it must also be about transforming or disguising or transcending that self it must use its narrative as a kind of veil hotly revealing partly concealing the self wolf's essays are full of metamorphoses imaginative escapades self-transformations her essays in attempt to form of shape-shifting or self-shifting and constantly they draw an imagery of clouds and dreams and journeys images that have to do with instability or strangeness i'll give you just a few examples in thunder at wembley a satirical view of the british empire exhibition at wembley in 1924 she decomposes the entire scene into a rush of storm dust whirling wind a violent commotion presaging the apocalyptic passing of empire and empires but that is what comes of letting in the sky she says at the cinema in an essay of 1926 called cinema the mind jumps to shakespeare why because poets like the cinema work through suggestion and that takes us on a mental journey in which one image metamorphoses into another she says in shakespeare the most complex ideas the most intense emotions form chains of images through which we pass however rapidly and completely they change as up the loops and spirals of a twisting stair and films remind her of that process in street haunting of 1927 she proposes that to walk london at dusk looking at people in the street and in at their rooms is to recognize that the self is streaked variegated all of the mixture the colors have run and that it is momentarily possible to persuade ourselves that we can leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into the bodies and minds of others a form which necessarily has to do with the self also needs for her to take on as in her many essays on historical figures or on other writers the personalities of others to explore the possibility of inhabiting alternative lives so the imperative of the essay according to wolf never to be yourself and yet always is something like the condition of a dream in which we are always ourselves yet seem to be or go beyond ourselves one of the things i think she means by never to be yourself and yet always is that being herself involves inhabiting the language of other writers wolfe will saturate herself in her essays in the voice of the person she's writing about and her imagination is filled to brimming with the writers that she most reads shakespeare the elizabethans the romantic part of the play of essay writing for her is it is allusion some of it quite subterranean and as as i've already suggested one writer whose essays gave for an example of how personality can be played with made up dissolved and reconstituted is charles lamb for her he's a prose writer to be read as a poet who she says souls to the height of fantasy actually it's the heights of fantasy swords for the heights of fantasy he was deeply attracted by his melancholy his fancifulness his imaginative leaps his dark comedy and his self-disguise in the essay writing persona of elia under which name he wrote his essays as felicity james notes you often see his influence on wolf but perhaps most of all in her extraordinary essay on being ill written in 1925 at a time when she was unwell and first published in 1926 the essay unpredictably metamorphosis through a number of different performances and discusses not only illness but language religion sympathy solitude and reading i'll briefly outline what's going on why has illness not been as popular as subject for literature as love it asks this couldn't be asked now why has the daily drama of the body not been recognized why does literature always insist on separating the mind or the soul from the body perhaps because readers would never accept illness as a subject for fiction perhaps because illness requires a new language primitive subtle sensual obscene but illness is almost impossible to communicate she writes let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry there is nothing ready made for him he is forced to coin words himself and taking his pain in one hand and a lump of pure sound in the other as perhaps the people of babel did in the beginning so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out it's hard it's hard to resist in in this painful account of the need for a new kind of language uh between patient and doctor a reminder of adam phillips psychoanalyst and patient listening out for what can hardly be said invalid she continues may demand sympathy but sympathy we cannot have people at once start complaining about their own condition and apart from a few social misfits whom she colorfully and rapidly invokes in the essay the world can't provide regular sympathy it will take up the whole working day besides illness really prefers solitude here we go alone and like it better so the ill have dropped out of the army of workers and become deserters this gives them time to do things normal people can't do like looking at the clouds all the flowers lying on their backs cut off from everyday life they are free to look up at the endless activity the interminable experiment of the cloudscape above and what they find alluring about clouds and flowers is not their sympathy but their indifference the ill unlike the army of the upright recognize nature's indifference they know nature is going to win in the end when ice will bury the world what consolation is there for that thought she goes on to ask organized religion heaven an alternative secular idea of heaven as invented by the poets and poets she likely jumps on are what we need when ill not prose writers in illness words seem to preserve a mystic quality we are attracted to intense lines and phrases to the incomprehensible to nonsense to the textures of sounds we make rash readings without critical intermediaries for instance of shakespeare and if we've had enough of him we can read some trash like some obscure memoir by augusta's hair which looks absurd but turns out when she tells its story to be all about pain death and agony this loose improvisation is netted together by a complex pattern of images drawing on water air earth and fire desert wastes and mountain peaks deep forests and vast seas clouds birds leaves and flowers as though through illness a whole alternative universe is created intensely physical the writing insists on the body like a pane of glass as the transmitter of all experience the body cannot be separated off it is monster and hero animal and mystic above all actor in an essay which is so much about play acting and scene making as the images in the essay cohere a satire on conformity begins to emerge the ill are the deserters the refusenix the eccentrics they won't accept the cooperative conventions they blurt things out they turn sympathizers away they won't go to work they lie down they waste time they fantasize they don't go to church or believe in heaven they refuse to read responsibly sitting up or to make sense of what they read they are attracted to nonsense sensation and rashness on the other side of the glass is the army of the upright harnessing energy driving motor cars going to work into church with the heroism of the ant or the bee writing letters to the times communicating and civilizing there's even a faint suggestion that in separating themselves from the army of workers the ill are like pacifists or non-combatants unconscientious objectors who nevertheless have their own battles to fight reading when ill is felt to be a form of deviancy and rash reading making one's own notes in the margin seems to also to allow for rash writing writing with the apparent willful inconsequentiality and inconclusiveness of this essay on being ill is as much about reading and writing as it is about illness in fact it's about reading and desire as though our erotic longings for absent lovers as we lie in bed with a high temperature get translated into longings for language the essay is bursting with quotations and allusions shakespeare to romantic writers such as de quincy wordsworth and lamb and all these literary echoes point the same way they all invoke a longing for escape or a struggle even a suicidal one with a hell of human anguish and depression charles lamb gets into on being ill with an echo of his 1825 essay the convalescent where his alter ego elia describes just as wolf does the peculiar state of mind that comes over the sick person who has a nervous fever like wolf lamb writes on the supreme selfishness and self-absorption of the sick person on how he becomes a world unto himself his own theatre and how the outside world seems to fall away from him and how sympathy is limited by sickness and her satire on the army of the upright invokes lamb's essay of 1826 popular fallacies that we should rise with the lark lamb just like wolf says in this essay that it's much better to stay in bed while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes are already up and about their occupation content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale we chose to linger a bed and digest our dreams and also he adds mournfully why should we get up we have nothing here to expect but in a short time a sick bed and a dismissal that sad quirky idiosyncratic tone of voice lingers on in the non-conformity of wolf's essay on being ill enters into the undiscovered country of illness with the kind of shape shape-changing unpredictability of the cloudscapes which it describes it moves freely and strangely between desire solitude suffering reading and language as it plays out the transformations to the self brought about by illness it sympathizes with the eccentric behavior of the ill person and it has also affected essay writing as a form of literary deviancy experiments and eccentricity

Channel: The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing

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Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021