INTERLUDE
Despite its dark notes and elements of what Shilo calls “de-composition,” this is one of my favorite interludes. I love the cinematic quality of movement: swooping in from the horizon over the ribs of the boat and the sea holly, across the waves, once more bringing in the girl, who is now wide awake, to the edge of the shoreline where the black tide-line of detritus now sharply defines the border between sea and land. Then the movement (I can’t help but imagine swooping up the hill to Talland House) into the garden, now also marked with traces of delimiting black -- the predatory black cat, the cinders on the ash heap. Then the zoom to micro-focus on the garden as seen from the ground as in Kew Gardens, including the snail who looms like a great cathedral and the vision of life among the flower stalks, arched over by the colors of flowers. (Have you read the paper I wrote abt snails in Woolf in 2013? I thanked you in the first footnote for suggesting the Marianne Moore ref that provides its title. It’s available on my academic.edu site.) There is an even deeper descent, into the ground, a realm of decomposing horror inhabited by worms (what Philip K. Dick calls “the tomb world”). Then the camera pulls out again to a wider focus, moving to the house, which, like the ocean edge, also seems to mark a boundary. While light goes inside, we seem to be outside the windows, part of a curious doubling of reflections. I also read the last paragraph as a first acknowledgement of the colonial implications scattered throughout the novel. But it is also another intimation of danger, an awareness of death: the South Africans with their spears held high approaching upon the feckless white sheep, foreshadowing the final spear raised against death at the end of the novel.
EPISODE
Bernard’s soliloquy at the beginning of the chapter just seems to go on and on, and every time he gets the floor he holds forth for longer than others speak. But listening to this episode over and over, I began to notice that Bernard was in fact making up stories about himself, just as he says he does about people he sees (like Woolf in “An Unwritten Novel” and “Mr. Bennett to and Mrs Brown”). He is “creating a face to greet the faces that he meets,” trying on different identities with a hilariously adolescent eye as to the their a/effect: “I am sooo, complicated; my future biographer will of course recognize my complexity. I am disparate, I am integrated; unlike the rest of you simple jerks, I can think and feel at the same time, dashing yet reflective (shades of Eliot again--thinking and feeling--a unified sensibility). I do tend to think more about writing than actually write, and when I do write it only superficially represents the glorious complexity of my brilliantly spontaneous mind.” I can barely read it now without snorting with amusement. Of course he thinks-- more like wishes-- he is like Byron!
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Neville’s monologue reminds me of the emotional wave structure of the entire book: a leaf fall from joy! (58). That falling leaf is one of the markers of suspension/ interruption in Woolf. Then the boats full of sculptural indolent unconscious young men (shades of Tonio Kroeger who loved and longed for those that didn’t fall down in the dance. Which reminds me that I want to look into Woolf’s knowledge of Mann. Reading Hare with Amber Eyes, I heard that Thomas Mann wrote an essay “Thought upon War” and immediately thought of “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”). But I digress…. a horticultural note: the “fountains of the pendent streams…fine strokes of yellow and plum color” describes a mix of bright yellow laburnum (like yellow wisteria) and lilac which blooms at the same time (see herbarium https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_86.html ). This color combo repeats on p.108 in the fifth Interlude, introducing Percival’s death.
Anyway, to get back to Neville’s rhythm: first is the joy, then the observation of the beloved, then the rising rhythm of words; then the frenzy collapses into insincerity and doubt; and finally is resolved by the approach of a friend. I see this pattern throughout the book; it is its emotional spine. p. 63: Ah, another echo of Tonio Kroeger...” I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous that follow perfection through the sand,” says Neville.
A favorite quotation from Tonio Kroeger[1] (one of my high holy books in college; I have this passage more or less memorized):
“He knew from experience that this was love. And he was accurately aware that love would surely bring him much pain, affliction, and sadness, that it would certainly destroy his peace, filling his heart to overflowing with melodies that would be no good to him because he would never have the time or tranquility to give them permanent form. Yet he received this love with joy, surrendered himself to it, and cherished it with all the strength of his being; for he knew that love made one vital and rich, and he longed to be vital and rich, far more than he did to work tranquilly on anything to give it permanent form.”
(I could have been a German double major, except for the Conversation course; I am so fluent in English that speaking German is a constant frustration to me--except when I am in Germany and slightly drunk).
I love the meditation on friendship on pg 63: how our friends contract us into a single identity, how our connection to them is spun out over space (and I think of Alma and Suzann: over time). And at the same time, the limited self that we are to one friend after another opens up a whole variety of selves to be.
I am very aware of the structure of this Episode; it really does feel like a series of soliloquies, each character defining their identity, often against the identities of the others. The wave rises and then receeds. Jenny unfurls, is rooted but flows (73), but then she loses consciousness of her body, but then regains it as someone approaches.
Except for Rhoda. “The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.”—another TSE ref? She is not whole, she is broken into separate pieces (“These fragments have I shored against my ruin”). Like Neville, she has a vision of noble statues of the heroically unified people she cannot be. She is “at the hot gates” “on the verge of the fire.” Wow.. this entire chapter seems under-woven with Eliot for me.
[1] Tonio K was written in 1901 and published in 1903; translation pub. in US in 1929). WSU library has a review copy of Buddenbrooks. Also a copy of Death in Venice, but not of TK. On Oct 30, 1938, VW mentions TM in the context of youth reading 3G’s. Someone gives her a copy of TM because he too explains “what we are doing”. I suspect this was a copy of The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), a copy of which is at WSU.
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