woolfy

I'm reading Night and Day, apparently Woolf's experiment with classicism, "in the vein of Austen's comedies of manners" as my book jacket says (yeah, like Austen...only weak). Reading it years after I first read Woolf's later, more experimental (modernist) stuff is more or less... superfluous. I'm so in love with To the Lighthouse that I doubt there is a paragraph that doesn't teach me something* each time I reread it, but this book is... empty. Why did you do this, Virginia? Why? It especially confuses me in light of everything Woolf says in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown about the importance of character-building, which I adore (and which some Sam-the-Eagle sort of people find convenient to pat on its adorable little head, but that is beside the point). Some might wager that it has to do with the artist's developmental trajectory (MFA students tell me that everyone has to write an embarrassing first novel and then throw it away), but I think she might have done it on purpose to fake us out. Because this was 1919. She had already written The Voyage Out. So, yeah. She did. Dang, Virginia.


Also: Is this the intentional fallacy? Well, in case you haven't heard, I've regained my beloved role as amateur reader.

Also: I'm totally above the intentional fallacy anyway, except in the case of Virginia Woolf because she has a face to me because of that stupid movie after that Cunningham novel and anyway I am going to be her for Halloween and I could probably channel her if I wanted to. I pretty much already look like this:





*Note: When I say "teach me something," I mean either a) teach me something about humanity/existence/the nature of reality or b) communicate beauty and usually c) both, and yes, this is all I care about in art.