Feb
23
Questions about Woolf’s Moments of Being
February 23, 2015 | Comments Off on Questions about Woolf’s Moments of Being
1. The Editor’s Note of my edition (2nd by Harvest/HBJ) explains that most of the essays here were not intended for publication. Should we adapt our reaction to the text knowing that these were her private works? If so, how? Is the posthumous publication of this private text an act of oversharing her work and life story?
2. In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf writes,
“And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.”
And in “Old Bloomsbury”,
“It may be true that the loves of buggers are not — at least if one is of the other persuasion — of enthralling interest or paramount importance. But the fact that they can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practised privately. Thus many customs and beliefs were revised.”
What do you make of these two reasons for storytelling, and for personal storytelling in particular? Does either or both justify the use here of intimate revelations about her father, George, Vanessa, Sibyl, etc?
3. What might be a contemporary equivalent of Bloomsbury/the Memoir Club? Is there one? Can you imagine one?
— Destry
