1.1 The sculptor’s essay

If, as Jessica Burstein argues, ‘spatial relations undergird’ the tenets of modernism, then perhaps a new way into modernist literature of the 1930s is to think about how ‘space’ was being creatively conceived elsewhere.[1] The sculptor’s essay is well-placed to discuss spatial form; it comes equipped with a vocabulary of dimension which is arguably more direct, accessible, and confident than its literary equivalents. The vocabulary of space in the art essay also, crucially, serves a broader question of form. Sculpture, then, offers a framework for thinking about the literature of the same period. This approach moves fromthe well-worn path of thinking about literary modernism in its own terms (i.e. writing about Bloomsbury novels using Bloomsbury criticism) – to thinking about modernism in its broader spatial effects.

Woolf was a key participant in the modernism that Frank’s essay misses. Despite this, The Waves is noteworthy in its anticipation of the discourses on spatial form that were to occur in the plastic arts throughout the 1930s. As Woolf wrote in her diary in October 1929:

Woolf’s implicit engagement with spatial ‘design’ is clear: she thinks not in terms of chronological sequence but of the overall effect. The diary entry evidences her psychological toying with ‘the possibility of spatiality […] with literality’ (Cavell). It traces the imaginative process which not only underpins The Waves but anticipates the artistic development that unfolds over the next few years in Unit 1 and Circle.

1.2 Woolf and Hampstead

It is important to resist viewing Woolf as a ‘solitary figure writing into a void’ (Hana Leper) and instead locate her within a nexus of artists living and working in London in the inter-war period. The recorded links of Woolf’s interactions with Hampstead, although few, indicate her stake in art theory and criticism throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Her encounters with Herbert Read, Henry Moore, and Roger Fry are three such coordinates of a wider web of her cultural activity in London.

Woolf’s interactions with Herbert Read offer a useful framework for thinking about her engagement with the art essay form. Read was an art critic who wrote for Woolf’s Hogarth Press throughout the 1920s and later edited Unit 1 in 1934. A close friend and supporter of Henry Moore after they met in 1928, Read described Moore’s sculpture as capable of producing the ‘greatest power and significance, [and] symbols of the deepest level of feeling and apprehension’.[3] Woolf likely read Read’s reviews and would have been exposed to his general criticisms of art prior to and throughout writing The Waves.

This interaction converges in February of 1935, (albeit after she published The Waves) in Woolf’s dinner with Henry Moore, Herbert Read, and their wives. Her diary offers little more than: ‘all went decorously. Steel chairs, clear pale colours; talk of pots; brainy talk, specialists talk’.[4] ‘Brainy talk’ reads as Woolf being engaged in the terms of modernism; this ‘talk’ is framed in haptic, tactile terms in the ‘steel chairs’ and ‘pots’ that she mentions. ‘Clear pale colours’, too, implies an attentiveness to a visual mode, with the curiously aesthetic term, ‘decorous’, furthering a sense of awareness of artistic form. Woolf’s interaction with the Hampstead Modernists across the late 1920s and early 1930s, although more difficult to pinpoint than her movements in Bloomsbury, proves to be a tangible one.

Furthermore, this ‘specialists talk’ between Bloomsbury and Hampstead was multidirectional. Woolf was a close friend of Roger Fry and published her ‘labour of love’, his biography, in 1940.[5] Henry Moore recalled picking up Fry’s Vision and Design at Leeds University in 1920:

Moore’s shared respect for Vision and Design – which Woolf described as ‘probably the most important art criticism of our time’ – captures Bloomsbury and Hampstead’s parallel engagements with art criticism in the inter-war period.[7] Fry’s chapter on ‘Negro Sculpture’, where he argues that the best sculpture has ‘complete plastic freedom’ which ‘conceive[s] of form in three dimensions’ was read and appreciated by both Woolf and Moore.[8] Fry prefigures much of what both Woolf and the Hampstead Modernists were to develop throughout the Thirties (and beyond). As Moore put it himself: ‘That was really the beginning’.

One key theory of sculpture which emerges in the 1930s – and builds on Fry’s preliminary observations in Vison and Design – is provided by Barbara Hepworth’s essay in Circle:

Hepworth’s unity between ‘idea’, ‘substance’, and ‘dimension’ is key for thinking about the aspirations of a spatial work. Her essay permits a discussion of Joseph Frank’s theory of spatiality through a sculptural view; Hepworth and her peers provide tangible, physical models for Frank’s abstract conceptions of ‘modern literature’. This world of spatiality – where ‘idea’, ‘substance’, and ‘dimension’ collaborate – is one which Woolf conjures in The Waves.

2. Spatiality in The Waves

A spatial theory demands a total consideration of the object of study. Therefore, a partial exegetical reading of The Waves cannot claim to capture the total effect of Woolf’s novel. However, close reading is still productive; by looking at the parts we gain clues as to how the whole operates – how, in Hepworth’s terms, a unity between ‘the idea, the substance, and the dimension’ is generated. Through close attention to Woolf’s language, one begins to see how thinking about writing and sculpture in tandem can bring forward new ways of thinking about spatial form.

2.1. Narrative (re)configuration and spatial form

At the beginning of The Waves, Woolf constructs a relationship between subjective viewpoints in a form which denies linear chronology, and therefore brings a spatial aesthetic into view. Woolf writes a kiss from multiple perspectives. First, Louis:

Then Jinny:

Then Susan:

Then Bernard:

Woolf observes singularity within a shared field of vision. The ‘dramatic soliloquies’ of The Waves (as Woolf called them in her diary) stage multiplicity where her characters are both divided and joined in the narrative.[14] On one hand, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Bernard can be read in terms of their limitation and differences. Louis is ‘shattered’ by the kiss, Jinny enters something of a sensory overload, Susan experiences ‘agony’, and Bernard witnesses this image of agony. Even colour interrogates varying subjectivity: Louis is in a ‘grey flannel suit’ yet Jinny sees him ‘green as a bush’. Similarly, Susan wraps up her ‘agony’ in a handkerchief while Bernard sees just a ‘ball’ – devoid of emotional dimension. Furthermore, Woolf distinguishes between the voices through her grammar – the feature of speech which expresses temporality. In the kiss, Louis functions in the reported present tense (‘she has found me’), Jinny in the past (‘dashed’, ‘kissed’) and the present (‘smell’, ‘dance’, ‘ripple’), Susan the past (‘looked’, ‘raised’) then the immediate future (‘Now I will’), and finally Bernard (back) in the reported present (‘has passed’). The emotional and epistemological aspects of this scene are discrete and available for re-evaluation.

On the other hand, and at the same time, these discrete statements are joined in a symbiosis. Woolf’s linking of the characters’ shared experiences of the kiss through the shared words ‘chink’, ‘kiss’, or ‘handkerchief’ performs, on a linguistic level, the interdependence of subjective viewpoints. This is magnified by the repeated focuses on sight and seeing (‘eye-beam’, ‘seeing you’, ‘I saw her’, ‘looked’) which interrogate varying modes of observation. The kiss’s effect depends on the synthesis of the subjective realities which interpret it. Nothing works in isolation. To make use of the theory proposed in Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative:the different perspectives of the kiss are heterogeneous events which are ‘emplotted’, so to speak, in a literary narrative which joins them. The Waves breaks down linear time into subjective viewpoints and recombines these viewpoints to create ‘a synthesis of the heterogeneous’.[15] It is this narrative synthesis, which ‘mediates between the episodic aspect and the configurational aspect’ (Ricœur), that brings about the novel’s spatial aspirations.[16]

The kiss, then, can be understood as a microscopic version of the novel’s broader efforts to work spatially. Woolf’s arrangement of multiple perspectives configured in a single event resembles the way one interacts with a sculpture. The effect echoes Barbara Hepworth’s Three Forms (Figure A). Following the birth of her triplets in 1934, Hepworth’s sculpture asks how the triangulation of forms can map human relationships. The different shapes and coordinates of her three forms resemble Woolf’s discrete and varying perspectives; like the voices of The Waves, they can be read as separate and singular. However, despite their variation, the forms are geometrically arranged in harmonious agreement (aided by the homogeneity of Hepworth’s material [marble] and the rectangular base which contains the sculpture). It is only in the configuration of multiple forms that the full aim of the work is realised – and the proportional relationship between the forms can be mapped and observed. Three Forms thus asks how a sculpture can be understood as one and three – part and whole – simultaneously. The parallax of the kiss in The Waves achieves its sculptural equivalent in Hepworth’s work. Both aspects of this scene – the disjunction and conjunction of voice – collaborate within one total view. This is not an isolated example: later in the novel, Woolf achieves a similar effect with the characters speaking about the same looking-glass.

The synthesis of voices and the narrative configuration on non-linear episodes in The Waves has been observed. Erich Auerbach, writing at the same time as Frank in the mid-forties, and anticipating Ricœur’s narrative theory, asks what the profit of this approach is in modernist literature. Auerbach discusses Woolf’s technique in her earlier novel, To The Lighthouse (1927),of interrogating a single objective reality through multiple subjective viewpoints. He concludes that modern writers attempt to grasp:

Despite the juxtapositioning of adjectival and grammatical differences, which bring about different emotional epistemological information, the kiss section of The Waves interprets a single event: the kiss. Objective reality is engaged with through subjective viewpoints – through ‘not one order and one interpretation, but many’. In The Waves, arguably to an even greater extent than the Lighthouse, Woolf pursues a spatial form: the synthesis of disparate meanings and sensations configured in a narrative. Akin to Frank’s discussion of James Joyce’s spatial form, she ‘transforms the very structure of [her] novel into an instrument of [her] aesthetic intention’.[18]

[1] Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Art Fashion. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012) p. 12

[2] Woolf, Diary, III, p. 259

[3] Herbert Read. Art in Britain 1930-40 Centred around Axis, Circle, Unit One. (London; New York: Marlborough Fine Art Ltd; Marlborough New London Gallery, 1965) p. 6

[4] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1930-1935 ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols (London: Hogarth, 1982), IV, p. 281

[5] Julia Briggs, ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Woolf and the Spaces in Time. (Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2001) p. 3

[6] From a statement in Partisan Review, New York, March–April 1947. Quoted in: Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900 – 1939 (Yale University Press, 1994) p. 219

[7] Woolf quoted in Briggs p. 8

[8] Roger Fry, Vision and Design. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920) p. 66

[9] Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. ed. Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo. (London; New York: Faber and Faber; Praeger, 1971) p. 113

[10] Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2000) p. 6

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Woolf, Waves pp. 6 – 7

[14] Woolf, Diary, III, p. 312

[15] Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), I, p. 66

[16] Ricœur p. 67

[17] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. trans.Willard R. Trask.  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) p. 549

[18] Frank p. 19