Mapping Consciousness (4/6): Was replicating consciousness Woolf’s conscious intention?

. . . art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self righteousness in religion.

The Penguin Letters of Vincent van Gogh – to Anthon van Rappard March 1884 – page 272

Given that Virginia Woolf, as a female novelist, picked up the challenge of Middlemarch and took it to a different level, it seemed worth republishing this sequence which focuses mainly on her.

The next two posts are going to be more challenging to write than the previous ones. The issues are a bit of a stretch. Firstly, it’s going to be quite difficult to convey what Woolf manages to achieve, and secondly it’s going to be almost equally tricky to tease out all the variables that can impact on any objective assessment of the quality of her achievement.

For example, my subjective response is so strong it clouds other issues to some extent, such as the need to examine the probable nature of consciousness from more than just this somewhat poetic perspective. Even if I do that, we come to possibly important distinctions between normal consciousness, in the sense of consciousness as most of us experience it, and other kinds of consciousness, some of which have been labeled ‘abnormal’ in a critical sense, and others which are seen as enhanced, as a result, for instance, of prolonged meditation under expert instruction.

Should an artist’s achievement be judged only in terms of how well she captures normal consciousness? In which case what is normal? Or should we be setting our sights somewhat higher and expecting an artist to tackle other states of consciousness in any work attempting, as the novel does, to represent a reality beyond the average scope? Perhaps we can fairly expect ‘madness’ to be delineated in places, and mystical states.

This is not even beginning to tackle aspects such as literary skill and the zeitgeist, or pervading collective cultural consciousness of the period.

You can see my problem.

I’m going to blast on anyway! Please stick with me if you still wish to do so.

Was replicating consciousness her conscious intention?

A fair question to ask at this point is whether she intended consciously to replicate consciousness in the novels under consideration here, ie To the Lighthouse and The Waves.

As is becoming my habit here, I’m going to start with the picture Julia Briggs paints. She feels that (page 77): ‘Woolf was set on capturing in words “the complex and evasive nature of reality.” She feels that (page 93): ‘Woolf had put behind her the forms of nineteenth century realist fiction which falsified, she thought, by assuming the novelist’s omniscience. Instead, her novel admits to uncertainties at every turn. She set out to write a novel about not knowing…’

To be fair to earlier novelists I feel obliged to subject you all to another detour.

The Cultural Context

Before attempting to convey the impact upon me of Woolf’s mapping of consciousness, it’s perhaps worth saying a few words about the literary context out of which her work sprang.

Thought she mentioned him only rarely in her work, journals and letters, Briggs was in no doubt that Shakespeare was a key influence upon her. Amongst other things he was the master of the soliloquy. This is not the same exactly as Woolf was attempting, but it may have been the soil in which her plan had its roots.

The main difference is that Shakespeare’s words were to be performed on stage and, while soliloquies were designed to give the audience an insight into a character’s mind that could not otherwise be conveyed, they were not attempting to reproduce exactly the contents of the character’s consciousness – not even in Hamlet, where the protagonist is famous for his introspection. Most of his soliloquies serve to open for the audience an illuminating window on his vacillation and his feelings about that. We see the tugging to and fro within his mind. It’s definitely a step towards Woolf’s destination and would almost certainly have influenced her, whether consciously or not. But she planned to divorce her maps of introspection from the switchbacks of a plot.

To leap forward to the 19^th Century, and before we consider Jane Austen’s innovation – free indirect speech – we can give a passing glance to Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and his complex masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, written after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Again, even though he is hoping to convey, in the latter work, the differing perspectives of the various characters on the key events of the plot, they are all addressing an audience of some kind as they speak. They are in persona, rather than introspecting alone.

What Jane Austen, followed by, amongst others Ford Madox Ford, attempted to do was to narrate her novel always through the eyes of one of her characters, rather than in her own voice.

A short quote from Austen’s Emma will illustrate her skill and give an example of her typical tone. Emma’s disastrous plan to link the low-born Harriet to the aspiring clergyman on the rise is being incubated precipitously and with no sense of its limitations in Emma’s mind:

Mr. Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head. She thought it would be an excellent match; and only too palpably desirable, natural, and probable, for her to have much merit in planning it. She feared it was what every body else must think of and predict. It was not likely, however, that any body should have equalled her in the date of the plan, as it had entered her brain during the very first evening of Harriet’s coming to Hartfield. The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency. Mr. Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connexions; at the same time, not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world.

We are not in Emma’s mind in the same way Woolf will enter the minds of her characters, but Austen is definitely not being the omniscient narrator, and we are experiencing Emma’s thought processes with all their limitations. She handles the clash of perspectives between characters mostly through skillful dialogue.

Ford Madox Ford followed faithfully in Austen’s footsteps. One example from the opening of Chapter III of Some Do Not (1924) will illustrate this clearly:

At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing patience engrossedly in a sort of garret room. It had a sloping roof outlined by black beams, which cut into squares the cream-coloured patent distemper of the walls. . . . .Tietjens, who hated these disinterred and waxed relics of the past, sat in the centre of the room at a flimsy card-table beneath a white-shaded electric light of a brilliance that, in the surroundings, appeared unreasonable. . . . To it Macmaster, who was in search of the inspiration of the past, had preferred to come. Tietjens, not desiring to interfere with his friend’s culture, had accepted the quarters, though he would have preferred to go to a comfortable modern hotel as being less affected and cheaper.

He then skillfully develops their contrasting perspectives without dialogue, which brings him even closer to the experiments Woolf then attempted.

By the time Woolf was writing her pioneering pieces another innovator writing in English had also appeared on the scene with his masterpiece (Ulysses in 1922), an author about whom she was somewhat ambivalent: James Joyce. She found him ‘sordid’ but ‘brilliant’ (Briggs – page 133). She felt he got ‘thinking into literature’ but recoiled from what she experienced as his ‘egotism’ and ‘desire to shock’ (Lee – page 403). I’m ignoring Proust, whom she acknowledges in an article of 1926, and had been reading since 1922. His use of memory though is often echoed in her work.

Was replicating consciousness her conscious intention continued?

Back to Briggs again.

In Mrs Dalloway (page 132) Woolf uses the technique of interior monologue. We see inside the minds of her two main characters. A previous work Jacob’s Room (page 133) ‘had alerted her to a problem created by interior monologue – that it risked producing a series of self-absorbed, non-interactive characters.’ Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, (ibid.) ‘is centrally concerned with the relationship between the individual and the group.’ As she moved forward in To the Lighthouse (page 164) ‘she wanted to re-create the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings as rapidly as clouds or notes of music, changes ironed out in most conventional fiction.’

Woolf was all too aware of how words can fail to catch the mind’s pearls (page 238): in a letter to Ethel Smyth, she wrote: ‘one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it won’t be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea.’

It is at this same point in her text that Briggs possibly overextends her argument in a way that I want to accept but don’t think I can. She writes, ‘despite an energetic and enjoyable social round, she always felt that the life of the mind was the only “real life”…’

In my copy of her widowed husband’s extracts from Woolf’s diaries I have the exact entry Briggs refers to here (Diaries – page 144).

The problem for me is that Woolf doesn’t use the word ‘mind’: she describes her work on the novel that became The Waves. The other diary entry Briggs refers to in her notes implicates a more appropriate word: Woolf writes (Diaries – page 126), ‘the only exciting life is the imaginary one.’ Imagination seems to be what Woolf is extolling. This distinction matters to me. Imagination is a power of the mind, but mind is not reducible to imagination, and therefore the life of the mind is beyond imagination alone. I may come back to that in more detail in a later post.

Do we have any other leads in her diary entries – the ones available to me at least?

A key quote for me comes on page 85:

I am now writing as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life; … I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; and that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there.

At the end of this sequence I may try to tackle more deeply the possible implication in this context of such words as mind, imagination, soul etc. For now all I will say is that the word soul could be taken to be subsuming into one concept thought, feeling, reason, imagination, mind etc. She is not engaged in refined philosophical discriminations here: she is using words that she knows are mere approximations to what she is trying to say. In which case is I’d better stop my nit-picking for now.

She does describe her experience of the mind as (page 123) ‘the most capricious of insects, fluttering.’ She is well aware it is elusive (page 131): ‘But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes.’ At times she feels she is getting the hang of it (page 81): ‘My summer’s wanderings with the pen have I think shown me one or two new dodges for catching my flies.’ But even such slight confidence clearly comes and goes. We have already heard her say (page 212), ‘I had so much of the most profound interest to write here – a dialogue of the soul with the soul – and I have let it all slip. . .’

Once she begins to really connect it gets easier but she has to proceed with due caution (Pages 218-20:

I make this note by way of warning. What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back and let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry.

… the well is full, ideas are rising and if I can keep at it widely, freely, powerfully, I shall have two months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. I can see the day whole, proportioned – even after a long flutter of the brain such as I’ve had this morning it must be a physical, moral, mental necessity, like setting the engine off.

She is also very conscious of the many different levels of experience that she needs to attend to. She describes them jokingly at one point (page 75):

But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc.

On a more serious note, but well after To the Lighthouse and The Waves were written, she hesitantly acknowledges (page 259:

I see there are four? dimensions: all to be produced, in human life: and that leads to a far richer grouping and proportion. I mean: I; and the not I; and the outer and the inner – no I’m too tired to say: but I see it: and this will affect my book… (18.11.35)

I will close with what I find to be a very revealing thought (page 97):

Have no screens, the screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatsoever in common with the screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might probably dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.

It is this permeability which so strongly characterises her writing. Here she speaks of a permeability to others, but she also displays the same porous quality to her own unconscious. What she then experiences is hard to capture. Perhaps this is why she is drawn to poetry so much (page 326), ‘is the best poetry that which is most suggestive – is it made of the fusion of many different ideas, so that it says more than is explicable?’

I think I may be ready now to tackle the texts themselves.

Mapping Consciousness (3/6): Woolf’s mental state – psychosis, transliminality or mysticism?

Rita and Hubert 1954 by Alice Neel (scanned from Alice Neel: painter of modern life edited by Jeremy Lewison)

My strongest sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are with those artists in whom I see the soul at work most strongly – . . . . I see something . . . . quite different from the masterly reproduction of the materials, something quite different from light and brown, something quite different from the colour – yet that something quite different is achieved by the precise rendering of the light effect, the material, the colour.

(Letters of Vincent van Gogh – page 272)

Given that Virginia Woolf, as a female novelist, picked up the challenge of Middlemarch and took it to a different level, it seemed worth republishing this sequence which focuses mainly on her.

Just to set the record straight, in the last post I may have left readers with the impression that Neel just dealt in sour portraits of people she was miffed with. That is very far from the truth. I thought I’d include here one of her portraits of the disadvantaged people who do not normally find likenesses of their face hanging in galleries or selling for huge sums. Her dedication to portraying the oppressed delayed her due recognition till very late in life. Her motive was not gain but compassion. The portraits are still in part maps of her awareness of and responses to the subject as a person, a fellow human being, not just plain reproductions of their outer appearance. The courageous portrait above, at a time when the current of racism ran stronger than now in American society, testifies to that, I think.

Virginia Woolf at last!

Virginia Woolf takes her art as an exploration of her mind to another level.

When I read of how much ground she covered while at the same time reflecting really deeply on so much of her experience, I am lost in admiration, I’m green with envy.

I struggle to resolve the conflict between roaming widely and digging deeply. All too often I get the balance wrong. When I roam I become shallow, and am all too often haunted by FOMO (the fear of missing out, for the uninitiated). When I dig deep it feels too narrow. Somehow Woolf seems to have a breadth of understanding not compromised by shallowness. Few people manage to go deeper or wider at the same time.

However, I need to remind myself that this is not going to be my main focus right now before I get completely derailed again. I want to look at her ability to capture consciousness in words.

Before we look in detail at the core issue I need to deal briefly with the problem of Woolf’s mental state and the impact of that on her creativity, both detrimental in terms of undermining her capacity to write, or even to continue living normally, at times of acute distress, and potentially positive in terms of her openness to inner experience because of a more permeable filter between her conscious and her unconscious mental process.

Woolf’s mental state – psychosis, transliminality or mysticism?

My first port of call in seeking to understand Woolf’s state of mind is Julia Briggs. She flags up what typically happened when a novel was finished (page 41):

Virginia frequently experienced depression and sometimes despair on completing a major novel, whether because she feared hostile criticism, or because she couldn’t bear to let it go, or because the sheer effort of finishing it to her satisfaction had exhausted her – or perhaps a combination of all three.

To my relief, Briggs does not descend into simplistic diagnostics, but looks at Woolf as a person first and foremost. She comments that a diagnosis like that of neurasthenia (page 46):

implies an innate disorder, rather than explaining her attacks in terms of the shocks she had undergone, although the series of sudden deaths in her family, sexual abuse and, later, her difficulties within their marriage and the seven-year task of completing The Voyage Out might be considered sufficiently traumatic in themselves to account for her suicide attempt and the long collapse that followed.

It was a major and serious breakdown in March 1915.

Later in her book Briggs explains an aspect of the sexual abuse she refers to. The person involved was her half-brother (page 352):

A darker aspect of sexuality threatened when Gerald Duckworth lifted the small Virginia onto a marble slab in the hall and ‘began to explore my body. I can remember the feeling of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower… His hands explored my private parts.’

Hermione Lee devotes a whole chapter of her biography to ‘Abuses.’ Partly these related to Virginia’s father’s domineering and attention-seeking patterns after the death of his wife, but even more importantly to the sexually abusive and bullying behavior of Duckworth. Her conclusion was (pages 158-59):

Virginia Woolf thought that what had been done to her was very damaging. . . . She used George as an explanation for her terrifyingly volatile and vulnerable mental state, for her inability to feel properly, for her sexual inhibition. And yet she also violently resisted simplistic Freudian explanations of a life through childhood traumas, and would have been horrified by interpretations of her work which reduced it to a coded expression of neurotic symptoms.

Briggs is certainly not tempted to explain her work in terms of the trauma she experienced (page 47):

. . . in exploring “all the horrors of the dark cupboard of illness”, in dismantling the tidy filing cabinets of the comfortable and familiar to confront chaos, Woolf suffered from madness, as conventionally defined, yet there was also something of poetic frenzy in it, and her art drew on what she found there.

Her episodes of physical illness also had a positive side (page 220): ‘illness, she recognised, could function as a form of “lying in”, a process that brought the work to birth…’

What else can we glean of Woolf’s own angle on this from her diaries?

Her never having had children seems in the end to be at least as much a product of her own desires as it is a result of her husband Leonard’s possibly protective preferences (page 119):

… oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man in a rock, to my one anchor. I don’t like the physicalness of having children of one’s own.

All of which makes her metaphor of ‘lying in’ during illness doubly intriguing.

She clearly explains To the Lighthouse as at least in part a way of exorcising the ghosts of her parents (page 138):

I used to think of him and mother daily; writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true – but I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.)

She also acknowledges the slump into depression when a piece of work is finished (page 144):

Directly I stopped working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.

Its consequences could have been potentially serious (page 229):

That’s the end of the book. I looked up past diaries – a reason for keeping them, and found the same misery after Waves – after Lighthouse I was, I remember, nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913.

If ending a piece of work plunged her into the depths, working on one could lift her (page 143):

I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working.

She even makes links between the creative act and her experiences of ‘madness’ such as after the completion of The Waves (page 169):

I wrote the words O death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead.

And the creative experience was not without its tensions (page 209): ‘I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain.’

There is the irritating tendency for the distraction of company to cause her to let slip valuable insights and inspirations (page 212):

I had so much of the most profound interest to write here – a dialogue of the soul with the soul – and I have let it all slip – why? Because of feeding the goldfish, of looking at the new pond, of playing bowls. Nothing remains now. I forget what it was about.

Or to simply gobble up time and energy she could have used for writing (page 258):

I am again held up in the years by my accursed love of talk. That is to say, if I talk to Rose Macaulay from 4–6.30: to Elizabeth Bowen from 8–12 I have a dull heavy hot mop inside my brain next day and an prey to every flea, ant, gnat. So I have shut the book…

She was neither a recluse nor a socialite but found the balance between them hard to strike while being fully aware of the evils at either extreme (page 342): ‘Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.’

Her diaries confirm what at least two of her novels suggest: that there was a degree of transliminality about her consciousness. Things kept bubbling up from below its threshold. These could occur at any time (page 67):

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things shining up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

The work itself drew her ever deeper. Concerning the writing of Mrs Dalloway she wrote (page 69-74):

. . . it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world. . . .

One thing, in considering my state of mind now, seems to be beyond dispute; that I have, at last, bored down into my oil well, and can’t scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface.

Fishing is the metaphor she settled on at one point to describe it (page 271):

She talked about the creative process, describing it as one of apparent inertia, of “mooning”, in which the artist as fisherwoman lets herself “down into the depths of her consciousness”, surrendering herself to “the mysterious nosing about, feelings around, darts and dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and elusive fish the imagination.’

The Waves raises another possibility (page 247):

The originating experience had been one of ‘the mystical side of this solitude.’ Writing it out required her to ‘come to terms with mystical feelings’, to acknowledge, if not a universal consciousness, then at least a wider design and meaning to which art aspired. Though Woolf shared her father’s impatience with conventional religion, her novel (The Waves) took up the challenge thrown down in the concluding sentences of Fry’s Vision and Design, where the attempt to explain aesthetic emotion threatened to land its author ‘in the depths of mysticism.’

When I came to look closely at The Waves the issue of interconnectedness kept rearing its head. More of that later, I hope.

Her take on religion is intriguing, and maps onto that of other writers such as Yeats (page 398):

Though Woolf did not believe in a personal God, “A Sketch of the Past” shows that she did believe in some kind of “world soul” embodied in beauty, form and meaning, and transmitted by great artists: ‘all human beings – are connected with this;… the whole world is a work of art;… we are parts of the work of art…

All in all it would be unwise to explain her creativity simply in terms of her vulnerable state of mind and her traumatic early experiences. However, it is possible that her intensity, her access to aspects of consciousness that elude most of us, and her moments of almost mystical experience helped shape the unprecedented focus of some of her later work, work that has drawn me in because of its almost unique ability to convey the experience of consciousness in words.

With luck, I should begin to address that more directly next time!

Mapping Consciousness (2/6): Capturing Consciousness in Paint

Van Gogh decided to concentrate on portraits . . . . In this field, he resolved to surpass photography, which, he felt, remained lifeless at all times, while ‘painted portraits have a life of their own, which springs straight from the painter’s soul and which no machine can approach.’

(Letters of Vincent van Gogh pages 311-12)

Given that Virginia Woolf, as a female novelist, picked up the challenge of Middlemarch and took it to a different level, it seemed worth republishing this sequence which focuses mainly on her.

At the end of the previous post, I flagged up Julia Brigg’s book on Virginia Woolf, a brilliant tour of the writer’s mind. Within it there are a host of insights into aspects of the creative process related to mental health and reflection, or perhaps more accurately in Woolf’s case, creative introspection. Whatever the right term is, part of her genius lies in her capacity to capture in words the subtleties and complexity of consciousness, including the rambling associative networks that can hijack attention at any moment.

I indicated that before plunging deep into Woolf’s approach to consciousness I was going to take a look at some paintings. They’re easier to use as an initial illustration of what I will be exploring.

Capturing Consciousness in Paint

I’ve blogged already about how the portraits painted by Alice Neel captivated me some time back, and how at roughly the same time I was reacquainting myself with David Jones, the poet, and discovering that he was also a painter.

Between them they illustrate clearly what I want to explore in more detail in a moment, mainly in terms of Virginia Woolf as novelist.

When we look at one of Alice Neel’s collection of souls (she termed herself a ‘collector of souls’) what am I seeing? Does she paint the appearance of the person or is she trying to capture her awareness, her impression of the person? There is a difference. I am aware that no painting could exclude some degree of subjectivity. What I am trying to tease out is whether some artists are more concerned to convey the contents of their consciousness, rather than to simply capture a faithful and exact likeness of the subject, and that this tendency can vary along a spectrum.

Rhoda Myers 1930 by Alice Neel (scanned from Alice Neel: painter of modern life edited by Jeremy Lewison)

Rhoda Myers 1929 (scanned from Belcher and Belcher)

Rhoda Myers

If we look at a portrait she painted of a close friend at the time, alongside a photograph taken of the same friend within twelve months, it might give us some clues. I have cropped the portrait at just below shoulder level, as the almost skeletal body of the figure would load the dice too far when we come to compare a cosy coat in the photograph with the exposed nude in the painting.

Even so the painting is darker. To be honest, if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t realise they are pictures of the same person.The accompanying text in the book of paintings suggests that Rhoda Myers is somehow resisting the painter and this is what is being picked up (Lewison: page 76). My sense is that, because Neel knew that Myers was drifting inexorably towards marriage and hated the idea of someone choosing domesticity over art as well as leaving her coterie in the process, this is what we see projected into the image as well. The question that the Belchers raise in their biographies of Rhoda and Alice seems more to the point (page 128): ‘Did her own turbulent emotions distort Rhoda’s face?’ If so, do we feel that this was to a significant extent, so that what we are doing when we look at the picture is entering Neel’s mind rather than the objective world. I suspect the painting has crossed this line.

I’m not discussing here whether what Neel conveys of her inscape adds to the value of the portrait: I’m simply saying that some mapping of her mind is taking place. The question of quality will come up later.

Lady Prudence Pelham 1930 by David Jones (scanned from The Art of David Jones: vision and memory by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills)

Prudence Pelham 1935 (scanned from David Jones: engraver, soldier, painter, poet by Thomas Dilworth)

Prudence Pelham

Similarly is David Jones not trying to paint reality but to paint his consciousness of reality which includes pulling items into his picture from his activated associative map?

When, early in his career, his portraits are relatively close in appearance to the subject, this may not be a major issue as we see when we compare his painting of Lady Prudence Pelham above with a reasonably contemporary photograph. Even so, the person in the photo lacks the aura the painting lends her, and not because she’s five years older: the aura is a projection of what is in Jones’ mind. As Bankes and Hills explain (page 86-88), ‘He fell in love with her spirit, wit and originality. . . He was . . . in awe of her courage, for she suffered from incurable and encroaching sclerosis, which gave her constant pain and prevented her sculpting; . . . [her] portrait . . . conveys fragility and radiance in equal measure. . . We are in no doubt about the strength of spirit that underlies Prudence’s frail physical beauty, and which touched Jones so profoundly.’ They point out she dominates her surroundings ‘that are rendered with a sketchiness that make all subservient to her.’

I have to add one more comment of my own into the mix. I do not know if Jones had read Yeats’ A Prayer for my Daughter. I suspect not. Even though Yeats met him on one occasion, Jones did not seem well-disposed to his work. Even so, the presence of a bellows in the bottom right hand corner of the picture rang bells for me.

Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

I am assuming that, if he had read the poem, Prudence would be on display as an example of the exact opposite of the type Yeats disdainfully describes in the poem. Either way, my picking up on what might have been an incidental detail and using it to read Jones’ mind is an approach his later pictures require if they are to be properly understood, in my view.

Female Warden during the Blitz (scanned from Bankes and Hills again)

Female Warden during the Blitz

To illustrate this possibility I have chosen a fairly straightforward picture of the Female Warden during the Blitz (Bankes and Hills – page 130), straightforward in the sense that it is very obvious where the Warden is standing and that she is in uniform, but there are all sorts of anomalies as well that bring other associations with them. Bankes and Hills link it thematically to a picture too complex to bring in here, Aphrodite in Aulis. They comment (page 130):

Whereas Aphrodite relates Greek myth to the present, the small drawing Female Warden during the Blitz . . . is a more private fantasy triggered by London in wartime. . . . The carpentering of the image is strong: ‘W’ stands out in bold on her helmet; three chevrons on her sleeve and an arrow on the wall behind point downwards to the low doorway to her right. Cigarette and torch in hand, like a sexy usherette she wards the entry both to pleasure and to the underworld.

They equate the cat to the soldiers near to the chained Aphrodite in his other picture.

For me they leave too many important question unanswered.

Why is she falling asleep? Is this simply an accurate depiction of a sleep-deprived warden he saw on the street, or does it have some other connotation meaningful to him, to do perhaps with our sleep-walking into war at the expense of women?

Why is the uniformed leg so grossly enlarged? Does it evoke a sense of male soldiers in uniform with all that this implies about war as being prosecuted mainly by the men it also kills? He was traumatised by his experiences of the First World War and I feel such thoughts could not have been too far from his mind.

Does it go further than that? The ‘W’ could simply stand for ‘Warden,’ but might it not also signify ‘Woman’? The significance of the cat notwithstanding, Bankes and Hills seem to ignore the obvious point that the female air-raid warden embodies both soldier in combat and captured Aphrodite. She therefore, for me, embodies the all-too-frequent grotesque and unequal conflict between feminine sexuality and male aggression, female nurturing and male destruction.

And we are invited to speculate more than they do, I feel, about where the door leads. The underworld, yes. Maybe even hell, in more Christian terms that would make sense to the Catholic in Jones. May be even simply being underground, in the sense of dead and buried, something many must have been uncomfortably aware of as they fled the bombs down tube station steps? Certainly not just some nightclub, as we all seem to agree.

And if Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and procreation, not just of pleasure, are not all these positives scarred and disfigured if not destroyed by war, and might this be in part what the image is representing in terms of what is in Jones’ mind?

It may be worth explicitly acknowledging at this point that, while Jones’ conscious intention may have been the driving force behind the allusive nature of his painting, even he would have agreed that he may have ended up communicating more than he consciously intended. From experience I have learned that my poems are often saying more than I realise at the moment of composition. Unconscious responses leak whatever our avowed intentions. That doesn’t, though, in my view, detract from the main thrust of my argument here: it simply extends it.

Where next?

I needn’t labour it any more, I think. This is a picture of his mind, not of the world outside, and it is impossible to take it as a literal representation of the world out there. His many other more complex paintings for me testify to how his experience as a cartographer in the First World War equipped him in a way to paint maps of his mind, and the associative networks within it, as it reacted to experience, myth and art.

So, are Neel and Jones therefore closer than they seem even though we appear to see a person first and foremost in her paintings and in his we see something more like a map? They may be both trying to do the same thing in different ways, to capture consciousness at the moment it is triggered by the world. They may only be differing in the lengths to which they are prepared to go in pursuit of the elusive goal of rendering consciousness visible in line and colour. Neel was notoriously hostile to abstraction in art: Jones’ position was more nuanced.

Mapping consciousness to this degree is perhaps a logical extension of an aspect of Impressionism in art and free indirect speech in the novel, so therefore not entirely unique to the Twentieth Century, though its manifestations were more extreme in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m not contending that this is the sole criterion for judging a work of art but it is a key one for my purposes as a student of consciousness.

Which brings us to Woolf’s amazing ability to make consciousness accessible in words on a page. More, much more of that next time including some key quotes from her diaries.

Mapping Consciousness (1/6): Concerning Distraction and Reflection

My strongest sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are with those artists in whom I see the soul at work most strongly.

Vincent to Theo – March 1884 (Letters of Vincent van Gogh page 272)

Given that Virginia Woolf, as a female novelist, picked up the challenge of Middlemarch and took it to a different level, it seemed worth republishing this sequence which focuses mainly on her.

Distraction

Last Monday was not my best meditation day.

I was doing quite well till my mind got hooked by my shirt. I found myself suddenly remembering how I thought twice before letting its red corduroy comfort go to the charity shop as part of our current declutter. Red shirt led to blue shirt, which led to blue jacket, blue trousers and Crewe Station. I was there again. Just as I was boarding the train, one foot on the platform and one foot in the air above the step, carrying luggage that should have made it clear I was a passenger, someone tapped me on the shoulder thinking I was a guard and asked me what platform the Liverpool train was leaving from. I turned to look at them and put my foot down between the platform and the train, scraping the skin neatly off my shin as I did so. Fortunately I dropped my bags on the platform and not on the line. I used a tissue to staunch the blood between Crewe and Hereford. Rather than go straight home, I called in on a friend who got out the TCP and Elastoplast. I still remember the sting to this day. I remembered that this was the friend I’d called on once before 20 years earlier, when – and this came vividly back to me despite the span of time – driving home tired down the Callow at the end of a long week, I was overtaking (legally at the time) in the middle lane (they’ve blocked that option since for downhill traffic), when I saw a car coming up the hill doing the same thing. The long lorry I was halfway past was picking up speed. All I could do was brake. As I tried to pull in slightly too soon, I caught the Lada on the back end of the truck. Fortunately the Lada was made of sterner stuff than most cars at the time and didn’t completely cave in or get derailed, but it was pulled out of shape and the near side front tyre was blown. I pulled into the side of the road and, with the help of the lorry driver who had stopped to check I was OK, changed the tyre. The car was slightly wobbly as I drove off and I knew it was not a good idea to drive it all the way home. I was amazed to pass a parked police car on the way with no interest shown on their part. So, I drove to my friend’s and parked the car on his front lawn, the only safe space off the road. He had a bit of a shock when he got home from work. At this point I snapped out of my trance of associations and brought my mind back to the focus of my meditations, shaking of my irritation with myself and my slight reactivation of the Lada-on-the-lawn stress as best I could.

Incidentally, I don’t wear blue anymore when I’m travelling.

Reflection

For this and other reasons I am revisiting an all-too familiar theme: reflection. To bring on board those who might not have read all my earlier posts on this issue I’ll pull in now a brief quotation from some time ago. It comes from a book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Hayes et al. It is attempting to explain that transient states of mind and mere self-descriptions are all too often mistaken for our true self. To help people step back from such identifications the authors liken the mind to a chessboard. We mistakenly identify with the pieces, not realising we are also, perhaps more truly the board (page 192):

The point is that thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, memories and so on are pieces: they are not you.

Peter Koestenbaum makes essentially the same point more abstractly in his excellent book The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy. Reflection, he says (page 99):

. . . releases consciousness from its objects and gives us the opportunity to experience our conscious inwardness in all its purity.

What he says at another point is even more intriguing (page 49):

The name Western Civilisation has given to . . . the extreme inward region of consciousness is God.

Personally, while I find the ACT analogy helpful, I prefer the idea of a mirror and its reflections, partly I suppose because it uses the same word in a different but helpful sense. Our mind or consciousness is the mirror and all our experiences, inside and out, are simply reflections in that mirror: they are not who we are, not even the most intense feelings, our most important plans, or the strongest sense of self. We have to learn to see them as simply the contents of consciousness. Only that way can we tune into deeper and wiser levels of our being. Mindfulness at its best can enable us to identify with pure awareness rather than with whatever transient trigger has grabbed our attention.

I have been working fairly hard (not hard enough probably, as the derailed meditation at the start of this post suggests) to put the insights explored in that sequence of posts into action.

Virginia Woolf in 1902 (for source of image see link)

Capturing Consciousness

It has led into me into some interesting territory.

While I was exploring the concept of transliminality even further back in time I came across A Writer’s Diary: being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf edited by her husband Leonard after her death by suicide. I was drawn to examine what she wrote in case it shed light on my attempt to link creativity, thresholds of consciousness and so-called psychotic experiences together.

Long before I could integrate what I found there into my model, my focus of interest had typically moved on: my mind is still more of a butterfly than a bee, despite my best efforts so far.

However, the Woolf issue was still stalking the door of my consciousness, whether I was aware of it or not.

As part of my decluttering, I am in the process, as I have mentioned elsewhere, of checking whether I still need all the books I have bought over the years. I take a book off its shelf at random from time to time, open it and see if I have read it or not. Sometimes there are highlighter pen marks within and I put it back, at least for the time being. Sometimes there aren’t and occasionally it’s not even got my name signed on the flyleaf. In which case I dip into it and read a few random pages. I reported on having done that recently with a biography of Hardy. I repeated the same process with Julia Briggs’ account of the creative life of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: an inner life.

Same outcome: no way that was going to the Oxfam bookshop.

Why not?

Basically her book was a brilliant tour of the writer’s mind. Within that there were a host of insights into aspects of the creative process related to mental health and reflection, or perhaps more accurately in Woolf’s case, creative introspection. Whatever the right term is, part of her genius lies in her capacity to capture in words the subtleties and complexity of consciousness, including the rambling associative networks that can hijack attention at any moment.

Before we tackle that head on, in the next post I’m going to make a detour via some paintings.

The Value of ‘Middlemarch’ (2/3): The Purpose of Art

What I was about to go on to explain in this sequence has been extended further by an interesting development. During meditation I am often visited by unexpected thoughts. A decision I have to make is about whether they are simply distractions to be ignored or insights that need catching. If I decide it’s an insight I have to put my timer on pause and quickly catch the insight on the wing in my notebook or else there’s a good chance I’ll lose it forever if I carry on meditating.

When I was just beginning to start work on this second post I realised in meditation that I’d need to check out Wonderworks for any references to George Eliot. I noted that thought.

When I later took down my copy of the book from my shelves I was astonished to discover that there was a whole chapter on her and there were also innumerable green highlights indicating that I’d read it at least once already, even though I couldn’t remember a word of it or even ever reading it! When I looked more closely at what Angus Fletcher had written I realised that some of what he said was crucial to this exploration. It added significantly to the picture I am attempting to paint of why George Eliot’s Middlemarch appeals to me so much.

Most of what he wrote belongs in the next and final post and explains in what way she represents what I think art should be about, something close to Bahá’í perspective but without God. What is relevant here belongs in the next section.

Compassion

There is so much said in these various texts about Eliot’s perspective on the purpose of art. I have tried to focus on what seem to me the key points.

To use an expression I coined after reading Robert Wright and then used as the title for a post about a book by Karen Armstrong, widening our ‘compass of compassion’ seems central to Eliot’s sense of purpose a novelist. Rebecca Mead quotes Eliot’s own words:[1] ‘If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.’ Davis quotes Eliot from George Eliot Essays (page 270) pointing in the same direction:[2] ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.’

Angus Fletcher expresses his sense that self-centredness contaminated the novel so that[3] ‘if Eliot wanted to introduce readers to the medicine of humanism, she’d have to do more than reform the strutting egoism of contemporary fiction. She’d have to invert the entire technology of the novel, upending its lordly aloofness with a humble togetherness.’

He argues that her use of ‘you and me’ was a key trope in this attempt:[4]

Prior to Middlemarch, in all known literature, ‘you and me’ never drops from the mouth of an omniscient third-person narrator. . . . They’re not equals, on our level, trying to establish a feeling of coming together; they’re lordly superiors striving to humble us with awe and fear.

Eliot wanted to eliminate any such superiority from her art.

Claire Carlisle is very much on the same page:[5] ‘[Eliot] believed that literature could – and should – teach virtue by refining and enlarging moral perceptions.’

I suspect that modernism, with its underlying sense of meaninglessness, is generally tempted to dismiss work such as Eliot’s Middlemarch as mere moralising. My feeling is that a capitulation to meaninglessness in art is a betrayal of reality and precipitates a deeper descent into the pit. So, even though, as a humanist, Eliot does not share my belief in the transcendent she is committed to a sense of the purpose of art to which I strongly resonate.

Inscape and landscape

On a completely different tack these writers detect another preoccupation that ring loud bells for me, not just because Bahá-u-lláh in his Writings laments the fact that few if any of us are both outwardly and inwardly united, but also because, from reading Hopkins in my teens, if not before, I have been acutely aware that the climate of the mind, part of the inscape as he possibly saw it, was as important as the climate of the earth we dwell on. The words ‘Dost thou consider thyself a puny form/When within thee the universe is folded?’, which I read in Bahá-u-lláh’s The Seven Valleys after deciding to walk the Bahá’í path, clinched it.

While Eliot again does not share my sense of the transcendent in this respect, she’s not too far from the same page it seems. Carlisle quotes Spencer to describe something which she feels is important to Eliot:[6]

According to Herbert Spencer’s theory, a flourishing life requires harmony in the organism’s ‘internal relations’ as well as in its ‘external relations’ with the world.

In Middlemarch, for example Eliot describes Dorothea reflecting:[7]

Any private hours in her day were usually spent in her blue-green boudoir, and she had come to be very fond of its pallid quaintness. Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls.

Rebecca Mead has no doubt about the importance Eliot attaches to the inscape and quotes another novelist to prove it:[8]

Eliot accomplishes what D. H. Lawrence gave her credit for doing before any other novelist: ‘It was she who started putting all the action inside.’

Improving Lives

So where exactly does all this lead us? Again, in a way that resonates strongly with me as someone attempting to become a Bahá’í, we find Carlisle pinning down Eliot’s overarching purpose:[9]

[T]he most important thing… [for her] was to ‘make a few lives near to us better than they would have been without our presence in the world’.

Philip Davis, in his biography The Transferred Life of George Eliot strongly reinforces this perspective:[10] ‘A realist novelist for whom art exists not for art’s sake but in the exploration and service of human life.’ Insightfully he observes that[11] ‘art might be no more than a flawed replacement for the religion she could no longer believe in.’

He astutely links inscape and landscape to this purpose:[12]

This is what a realist novel might do eventually: investigate that desperately needed integration between within and without, while testing also its own relation to the world it sought to represent; seeking therefore within the vital multifariousness of things the possibility of some nonetheless holistic order.

He sees this as leading us towards a sense of interconnectedness:[13] ‘it was fiction finally… that could be best depict the achievement of a sudden, unlikely human connection.’

This helps us transcend the limitations of our default egocentrism:[14]

Transhumanation was the emotional process by which great value in a person or a work or an idea could expand the powers of those who received it beyond what they could normally command.

This partially transcendent view goes some way towards the Bahá’í sense of the purpose of art as Ludwig Tulman expresses it:[15]

. . . . the role of the fine arts in a divine civilization must be of a higher order than the mere giving of pleasure, for if such were their ultimate aim, how could they ‘result in advantage to man, . . . ensure his progress and elevate his rank.’

Art, in Eliot’s sense, can improve the world:[16] ‘she wants . . . to make literature the remedial, preparatory, and cross-border work by which a warmer humane world may come into being.’

Basing his contention of the psychological richness of her novels Karl argues that she was[17] ‘perhaps the first psychological novelist in English,’ and points out:[18] ‘how much new ground Middlemarch broke to the degree that it defined a new kind of realism in English fiction… the craft that recognised such fragmentation in human experience, had made old-fashioned chronological narrative no longer possible – only clusters of events would do. When she was finished, the novel genre was becoming a different form.’ The perfect novel for a retired psychologist to keep reading, then!

Even Emily Dickinson from across the pond was impressed:[19]

Emily Dickinson, in Amherst, Massachusetts, commented on the book as containing the mysteries of human nature, and she wondered what kind of creator could have brought forth such a work.

Virginia Woolf was less enthusiastic:[20]

[Woolf] says that Eliot – the granddaughter of a carpenter, as she reminds us – is out of her depth, when it comes to the depiction of higher social strata, and resorts to stock images of claret and velvet carpets. Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack.

Her toffee-nosed verdict on George Eliot discounts the probable extent of her debt towards the bumpkin she seems to think she is! She was one of those who, as Carlisle[21] puts it, broke ‘the form of the novel in order to move beyond her.’

Next time I’ll be moving on to look at issues of faith and belief.

References

[1]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 56.
[2]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – page 267.
[3]. Wonderworks – page 235-36.
[4]. Op. cit. – pages 237-38.
[5]. The Marriage Question – page 43.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 106.
[7]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 372.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 226.
[9]. The Marriage Question – page 188.
[10]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – from the fly leaf.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 22.
[12]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – page 42.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 56.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 58.
[15]. Mirror of the Divine – pages 29-30.
[16]. The Transferred Life of George Eliot – page 206.
[17]. George Eliot: a biography – page xii.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 480.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 514.
[20]. The Road to Middlemarch – page 46.
[21]. The Marriage Question – page x.

Unfinished Business

Given that my post tomorrow mentions the bookcase in my family home when I was a child, it seemed worth republishing this poem which draws on a disturbing discovery I made too early from the cupboard underneath the main bookcase.

For source of image see link