Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (4/4): Alice Neel & Expressionism

Ginny, 1984 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life — page 219)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

At the end of the previous post I indicated that I would be moving onto the Expressionist leanings of Neel’s art, primed by comments in Collecting souls. For example,[1] ‘[as] Alice withdrew increasingly into herself, her paintings exploded in expressiveness.’

She resisted what the Belchers term ‘abstract expressionism.’[2] They go on to explain why:

Alice remained committed to the human figure as the centre of her art. Her faithfulness to a belief in the importance of the human being stretched beyond an ideology of humanism. To Alice, artists have an obligation to history, not just to record, but to interpret the richness and complexity of the life of the period in which they live. She believed “that more is communicated about an area and its effect on people by a revealing portrait than in any other way.”

She persisted down this path even though she knew that ‘figures were not commercially viable.’

In Painter of Modern Life, Petra Gördüren in her chapter on Emotional Values lists her expressionist influences:[3]

The founding figures of modern art – Vincent Van Gough, Munch and Oscar Kokoschka – are primarily cited in this context, artists who, like Neel, understood painting as the expression of subjective sensations and did not hesitate to explore the depths of the human psyche.

Her expressionism seems to blend with her politics, into something I am tempted to label ‘social expressionism,’ as Gördüren seems to hint at when she writes (my emphasis):[4] ‘Neel established herself as a painter of the very personally felt social realism that dominated American painting of the late 1920s and the 1930s.’ Laura Stamps in her chapter, A Marxist girl on Capitalism, points very much in the same direction:[5] ‘She developed her characteristic style, tending on the one hand towards Expressionism, and yet also towards the documentary.’

Following up on my discussion in the previous post, this appears to be also linked with her tendency towards projection, as Stamps is strongly indicating: [6]

She wanted to capture her subjects psychologically and socially… Neel also deliberately projected her own desires and fears onto her subject. She in fact chose portraiture in order to enter into dialogue with “the other.”

The Belchers quote the words[7] ‘capturing of things essential’ to describe this quality in Neel’s work, and refer to[8] what seems to be ‘an unusual mingling of social commitment and subjective intensity.’ They attribute her motivation for this blending of personal and political to her being[9] ‘an individual who had suffered greatly’ so she therefore ‘painted pictures that communicated one of her core creeds, that “no one on earth should suffer.”’ A telling way to summarise this can be found in Laura Stamps A Marxist girl on Capitalism:[10]

She was working on something that, though it clearly concerned herself, also transcended the personal.

Closing Comments

In Painter of Modern Life, in the Catalogue of Works, we find an appropriate portrait on which to end this sequence: Ginny, 1984:[11]

Painted during the winter in Vermont, it depicts Ginny in mourning for her mother who died the previous year, and was painted at the time when Neel knew her number was up, for she had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. . . . It is clearly an expression of endings,… an image of such power and subtlety that it appeared to subsume the knowledge of a lifetime of painting.

A perfect example, in fact, of the empathic projection I have been attributing to her most emotionally powerful portraits.

I can’t quite avoid being triggered into reflections here about van Gogh. When I am confronted by his life and his greatest art I find myself asking, ‘How is it that we so often find such life-enhancing beauty flowering from the soil of such peace-destroying torment?’ It gives Dylan’s dictum that ‘behind every beautiful thing there’s some kind of pain,’ a strange relevance. Behind the obvious meaning that encounters with beauty create a fear of their loss, there lurks the idea that out of some kind of pain everything of beauty flowers.

With Neel, though, you almost always see the pain behind the beauty: not so with van Gogh’s greatest work, where the beauty often masks the pain.

With both van Gogh and Neel, of course, we need to be concerned at least as much by the pain they caused to others as by the pain of others they capture in paint.

Alice Neel, at least to a significant extent, saw herself as painting to draw attention to the costs of inequality and discrimination, and is now credited with having succeeded in doing so. From a Bahá’í point of view one of the main purposes of art is to enhance consciousness, not least in terms of raising our awareness of our interconnectedness with all humanity, in fact with all forms of life, as well as widening our compass of compassion. This seems to have been the main purpose of Neel in amassing this collection of souls. I am not sure she would have been aware that this title for her work had been in a way anticipated by a woman poet of the 19^th Century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she wrote in her narrative masterpiece Aurora Leigh (First Book – lines 1097-98):

. . . .paint a body well

You paint a soul by implication.

Does the extent to which she succeeded in doing so justify the pain she caused others by focusing on her art and neglecting them? Are we facing a Dickensian problem here – and I don’t mean the Jellybys in Bleak House – I am referring to the novelist’s total lack of care and consideration for his wife, the mother of his children, whom he demonised, and deprived of contact with them, while at the same time exploring Scroogian conversions to caring and compassion, and advocating the mantra that ‘humanity is our business.’

Maybe we all face dilemmas of this kind, for example when we try to balance the needs of work and family. In the process we all make mistakes, perhaps only realising too late that we have spent too little time with our children in pursuit of our career, because of what we saw as our vocation.

Getting the balance right is a difficult art in itself, from the mastery of which our devotion to what we see as our real work in life can permanently derail us.

So, I am not keen to leap to judgement against Alice Neel, and condemn her for the possibly negative impact of her art on those closest to her who needed her most. I don’t see her as being as ruthless and deliberate as Dickens was, in defaming his wife to disguise his own involvement with his end of life romance. She was, as we have seen, to some degree tormented by the conflict between her art and the needs of others. Possibly the damage she caused was more than compensated for by how the suffering she depicted may have lifted her contemporaries’ attitudes to the left-behind and deliberately excluded to a higher and more compassionate level.

The Belchers seem to think so:[12]

. . . . hundreds of canvases, a buried treasure trove, chronicled Alice’s America over forty years, and even if any one portrait was not enough to capture the attention of the new category of viewers, the ‘oeuvre’ as a whole was compelling. . . . One art historian wrote that Alice had made portraiture “something more generous, more democratic and more expressive than it had been before . . .”

I can only suggest that this is a judgement call we each will always have to make for ourselves, both about the balance of our own lives as well as that of any public figure we admire and respect, be they artist, politician, activist, philanthropist, parent, partner or whatever else.

Anyway, I am grateful to these books on Neel’s life and art for forcing me to confront this important issue in all its complexity. Both books are definitely worth reading carefully, and her paintings will reward equally close attention, I believe.

References:

[1]. Collecting souls – page 123

[2]. Ibid. – Page 201

[3]. Painter of Modern Life – page 31.

[4]. Ibid. – page 38.

[5]. Ibid. – page 41.

[6]. Ibid. — page 44.

[7]. Collecting souls – page 80.

[8]. Ibid. – page 172.

[9]. Ibid. – page 176.

[10]. Painter of Modern Life – page 42.

[11]. Ibid. – page 228.

[12] Collecting Souls – page 240.

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Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (3/4): Alice Neel – her social consciousness

Mother and Child (Havana), 1926 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 71)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

I closed the previous post with the reflection that, in perhaps a similar way to van Gogh, her art was her most constructive way of connecting with life: in her case, this was mainly with people:[1] ‘Alice Neel once said that, for her, painting was a way of reducing the distance between herself and others, and the world around her. It enabled her to express a deeper sense of experience: [2] ‘Neel repeatedly described the absolute necessity of visualising an inner sensation, and inner reality, as the motivation for her tireless productivity as an artist.’

There is a wealth of evidence to support the view that she had a special affinity with those our unequal society has left behind, what in Collecting souls is called ‘opposites’. The Belchers list her typical subjects in Havana as ‘beggars, poor mothers, and blank-eyed children, black dancers, and quietly desperate old people.’[3] It’s perhaps worth noting that Naifeh and White Smith in their biography of van Gogh describe him as equally fixated on the same strata of his society in his early work: he did not display the same degree of understanding as Neel seems to have done, and one reason he chose such models may have been that he could afford no others.

Neel’s motivation seems to have been more political: painting the left behind was her way of ‘condemning the society that produced outcasts.’[4] She joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, as ‘the thing to do for anyone with a social conscience.’[5] One of her admirers called her a ‘poet of the ugly, the lyrical, the down and out, bohemian to the core.’[6]This relates to the description of someone else who knew her:[7]

“You have done in art what writers do in the characterisation in a novel. You have called yourself a collector of souls; you have said that you would like to make the world happy.

There seemed to have been other factors at play as well. Lewison, in his introduction to Painter of Modern Life[8], mentions the possibility that in her art ‘a new humanism was another way of maintaining or developing painting’s relevance post photography.’ Annamari Vänskä, in her article in the same volume, describes ‘the driving theme of Neel’s output is her social consciousness’ and argues that she ‘saw art as an arena for social criticism .’[9]

There is another possibility, which complements rather than contradicts this perspective. In the Catalogue of Works which completes the volume Painter of Modern Life the commentary on the painting Mother and Child refers to Neel’s ‘lifelong interest in depicting mothers with their children.’ This sits easily alongside what the book describes as Neel’s ‘great empathy for the disadvantaged.’ [10]

However, her interest in this theme of motherhood to me also implies that there might also be an element of projection in Neel’s portrayals of her subjects. This could easily combine most of the time with a degree of genuine sympathy with the subject. It may even have helped enhance the emotional impact of her portraits.

There will be more to say on this matter when I come to discuss her choice of Expressionism. For now, suffice it to add, her attitude to motherhood was in no way sentimental. She painted it as it was in a way that was anticipated by Munch ‘when he wrote in a notebook around 1889: “No longer should you paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. They must be living beings who breathe and feel and love and suffer.”’[11]

The Catalogue continues to highlight how she conveys ‘a sense of adversity experienced by the poor in a period of high capitalism,’[12] and, for example, portrays ‘an African-American man with his Caucasian or Hispanic girlfriend in 1954’ as ‘a statement of solidarity with a cause.’[13]

Death, as I mentioned in the first post of this sequence, was also a constant preoccupation, not least because of her loss of Santillana, ‘as it had been in the mind of her mother following the death of her child, Hartley, from diphtheria before Alice was born.’[14] We will see later a powerful example, painted towards the end of her life, where she captures the grief of a young woman for the death of her mother, even as she paints that portrait in full knowledge of her own diagnosis of terminal cancer – a perfect fusion of empathy and projection.

The issue of projection was almost certainly not restricted only to motherhood and death. In the Catalogue of Works there is a rare self-portrait painted late in life. The comment on it contains an illuminating sentence:[15]

Neel was, in general, uninterested in self-portraits, preferring to project herself into others; thus in some senses her portraits of other people contain elements of her own character.

We are left at this point with a quandary. Did she choose the subjects of her paintings because she genuinely felt for them or because she perceived them as reflections of herself, or possibly both?

I think the evidence suggests it was a bit of both. The Belchers’ view is that:[16]

. . . as an individual who had suffered greatly, she painted pictures that communicated one of her core creeds, that “no one on earth should suffer.”

and mention that:[17]

art historians have noted simply that her paintings during this period were marked by “an unusual mingling of social commitment and subjective intensity.“

Whatever the exact truth of that may be, her work became more clearly expressive, partly as a result of an enforced change of medium:[18]

Her other discovery, during those months and the following year, was also the result of her poverty. She learnt to paint, expressively and with control, in watercolours… If Alice had been able to stay with oils alone, she might not have developed the crisp new style with the bold lines that became her hallmark after 1930.

Alongside that,[19] ‘[as] Alice withdrew increasingly into herself, her paintings exploded in expressiveness. Her line grew bolder as her morbid preoccupation with herself grew stronger.’

More of that next time when we come to consider in more detail her choice of Expressionism.

References

[1]. Painter of Modern Life – page 46.

[2]. Ibid. – Page 38.

[3]. Collecting Souls – page 78.

[4]. Ibid. – page 80.

[5]. Ibid. – page 159.

[6]. Ibid. – page 242.

[7]. Ibid. – page 247.

[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 28.

[9]. Ibid. – page 58.

[10]. Ibid. – page 70.

[11]. Ibid. – page 166.

[12]. Ibid. – page 112.

[13]. Ibid. – page 132.

[14]. Ibid. – page 124.

[15]. Ibid. – page 206.

[16]. Collecting Souls – page 176.

[17]. Ibid. –  page 172.

[18] Ibid. – page 88.

[19] Ibid. – page 123.

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Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (2/4): Alice Neel – her mental health

Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, 1972 (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 191)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

I am going to leap to rather later in her life to gain an understanding of where her attempt to deal with the conflict between art and life described in the first post led her. We’ll see whether she was simply leaping out of a frying pan into a fire, or whether something more constructive was in process.

In spite of being clearly drawn towards social causes, she was not a ‘joiner,’ as I have mentioned already in the first post. She seemed instead to be ‘a loner whom events pressed for commitment’ but ‘her real commitment’ was ‘on canvas and not in cabals or on committees.’[1]

From 1936 until the end of 1941, she ‘had lived with two different men, [and] had a son by each.’ Her explanation for why her life was ‘so out of hand . . . was her complete devotion to her art. She consciously created her art; the rest of her life just happened.’[2] Her relationships with men were hardly ideal. When Spanish Harlem was her home, she lived with Sam Brody, who was ‘[s]elfish and quarrelsome’ and even ‘sometimes violent.’ Her relationship with Hartley, her second son by Sam, was ‘complex and difficult’ for the next seventeen years.[3]

But more difficult even than all that, by her own account, was ‘living with the selfishness that painting demanded.’[4] She said that ‘to be an artist, one must have the will of the devil.’[5] Those who knew her described her as having a ‘tremendous ego,’ and beneath her ‘marked sweetness’ lurked undertones of ‘unpleasantness and a touch of paranoia.’[6] In summary, ‘She was becoming, to some, intolerably self-centred.’[7] In a commentary on her painting Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, the adjective ‘narcissistic’ creeps into the mix.[8]

It’s not looking good on the basis of this, neither for her quality of life nor the nature of her character.

Neel & Santillana at Belmar, New Jersey, 1928 (scanned from page 220, ‘Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life’)

The Mental Health cost

Possibly the worst of it was the impact of all this on her mental health. Santillana, her first child, died two weeks before her first birthday. Isabella, or as Carlos preferred to call her, Isabetta, was lost to her along with Carlos when they split. When she was asked once, later in life, what caused her breakdown, she did not mention any of that:[9]

… But when she was honest with herself, she was able to admit that she had reached the point when she was no longer able to cope with the demands made on her by her passion for painting, her love of Carlos, her guilt over her children, and her dread of the future.

Moreover,[10] ‘It was in her mother’s home that she was made to feel irresponsible and selfish for wanting to paint.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the attitudes of the time both to women and to art, in the mental hospital, [11] ‘Whatever their technical diagnosis, they would not let her draw or paint. Instead, they wanted her to sew.’

And this is the point where I think we get at least a pointer towards the true nature of the issue here:[12]

. . . by denying her art, her psychiatrists denied a part of her.

. . . Would her treatment have been different if one of her psychiatrists had penetrated to her soul and there discovered a need for painting so great that it had consumed most of the rest of her identity?

If this description is true, what exactly does it imply?

I am currently revisiting the life and art of van Gogh. The biography by Naifeh and White Smith suggests a more disturbingly intense but not dissimilar combination of factors: most pertinent here would be his mental instability, his fractious relationships with others and in the last quarter of his life the possibility that a complete and unqualified devotion to his art gave him at least in part the fulfilment he had been yearning for all his life, even though its true value went unrecognised in his lifetime.

And that last point, a dearth of recognition, was also true for Neel over many decades. She did at least live long enough, though, to earn respect as an artist before she died.

During the peak of her breakdown she contemplated suicide. What helped her transcend that darkness? Her art:[13]

. . . Alice decided, sometime in the spring of 1931, not to die. Virginia Woolf found no reason to live; Alice did.… Alice stumbled again onto art. She credited the rediscovery with saving her life.

It was not an easy path back to her vocation, but she trod it successfully:[14]

. . . .at the time she started to draw again, Alice was incontinent. But she had to learn to hold her bladder long enough to execute a drawing. It was torture, but she imposed this first of many disciplines upon herself in order to do art. From that point on, she decided to get well.

In perhaps a similar way to van Gogh, her art was her most constructive way of connecting with life: in her case, this was with mainly people:[15] ‘Alice Neel once said that, for her, painting was a way of reducing the distance between herself and others, and the world around her. It enabled her to express a deeper sense of experience: [16] ‘Neel repeatedly described the absolute necessity of visualising an inner sensation, and inner reality, as the motivation for her tireless productivity as an artist.’

This is where it becomes difficult to dismiss her dedication to her art as merely narcissistic, while at the same time making it equally hard to excuse its cost to others, including her children, even though many of her paintings inspire the kind of compassion she sometimes seemed to lack. She’s by no means the only artist enacting this dilemma.

Which brings us to point at which I need to discuss her social conscience or should I say consciousness. I’ll save that for next time.

References:

[1]. Collecting Souls – page 168.

[2]. Ibid. – page 177.

[3]. Ibid. – page 178-79.

[4]. Ibid. – page 202.

[5]. Ibid. – page 203.

[6]. Ibid. – page 204.

[7]. Ibid. – page 213.

[8]. Painter of Modern Life – page 190.

[9]. Collecting Souls – page 136.

[10]. Ibid. – page 137

[11]. Ibid. – page  139.

[12]. Ibid. – page 140.

[13]. Ibid. – pages 142-43.

[14]. Ibid. – page 143.

[15]. Painter of Modern Life – page 46.

[16]. Ibid. – Page 38.

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Book Review – ‘Collecting Souls’ (1/4): Alice Neel – art versus life

‘Rita and Hubert, 1954’ (scanned from Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life – page 133)

The sequence which partly focused on Táhirih caused me to think about other female artists who, while they did not suffer devaluation as a woman as she did, were also seriously underestimated for much of their lives. Alice Neal is one such artist. 

Sometime in 2017 I made a trip, not for the first time, to Hay on Wye. For those who do not know, this is a book lovers’ paradise. However, it is probably a dangerous place for a bookaholic such as myself to visit.

I came back with my usual trawl of several only apparently fascinating books, including over the years, as my worst example in 1992, the complete works of Chaucer in a single hefty volume, which has remained unread ever since. 

One of the purchases, though, has stood the test of time: it’s Collecting souls, gathering dust by Gerald and Margaret Belcher. It describes the lives of two initially closely connected people, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary.

I have touched on their relationship briefly in an earlier post, written shortly after encountering her work for the first time.

The main impression I was left with at that point I summarised as follows: 

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 of Rita and Hubert, at a time when the current of racism ran stronger even than now in American society, testifies to that, I think.

Recently I felt moved to revisit her work and the biography I’d read. I came away thinking I need to do more justice to the depth and complexity of her work, and the way it again forced me to confront the vexed issue of the artist and their life. She has been labelled a ‘narcissist’ and I feel the need to try and tease out how far a devotion to any form of art must necessarily interfere with our relationships with others and how far this warrants applying that pejorative label.

It is important to flag up right from the start that there are several issues that predispose me to connect favourably to Alice Neel in spite of all her well-recorded failings.

First, there is the conflict described in ‘Collecting Souls:’^[1]

‘Alice was not a leader or a joiner. She was a loner who events pressed for commitment. She joined groups, but made her real commitment on canvas and not in cabals or on committees.’

Right from the joke my Jungian psychotherapist shared with me many decades ago, even to some extent till now, there is a reason why this resonates with me. We were discussing what my epitaph would be. With a wide grin he suggested, ‘He died with his options open.’ I had consistently found ways of avoiding making commitments or joining groups. Even though I have been an active Bahá’í now for 39 years and married for almost as long, the way I have gravitated towards poets and artists who are misfits and loners strongly suggests that I share their ‘solitario’ streak to some extent, as a number of posts on this blog seem to indicate.  

Then there is the question of death. 

In reading the gloss to Neel’s picture of her dead father, I found:^[2]

‘Death was ever present in Neel’s mind following the demise of her first child, as it had been in the mind of her mother following the death of her child, Hartley, from diphtheria before Alice was born.’ 

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read my poems about my family to hear that my sister Mary’s dying four years before I was born in 1943, and the atmosphere of grief surrounding my childhood, causes me to resonate to that. 

Then we have her taste in art. The painters she admired included Munch, Van Gogh and Goya, three of my favourite artists, as my blog once more suggests in places. The fact that they steered her towards an expressionist rather than an abstract form of art also helps me connect more easily with her work

Her social values, which led to art as her kind of activism, were not dissimilar to the values which led me to move from socialism and choose the activism of providing therapeutic support to one of the more neglected groups in our society: those who had been labelled psychotic. 

I don’t think these biases blind me completely to her flaws as a person or her possible limitations as an artist, but they might lead me to minimise them somewhat, so beware.

There are now three main themes that I would like to explore:

1. The Art versus Life conflict, with its associated issues of aloneness, possible narcissism and mental health problems;

2. Her social consciousness and related issues of humanism and communism; and

3. Expressionism.

Art versus Life

I’ll make a start on this theme now and expand on it more fully in the next post.

First of all I want to confirm that there was indeed such a conflict for her.

Collecting Souls portrays exactly that. Almost from the start, she was concerned that her first husband/partner, Carlos, ‘would want more. He would expect children, a commitment of a new kind.’ He would want her to ‘become the mother of his children.,’^[3] but she ‘refused to play the role of Cinderella and live happily ever after.’^[4] She didn’t ‘want to be pregnant.’ She rebelled in Havana when she sensed ‘more strongly the restrictions that Latin motherhood was about to impose on her freedom.’ ^[5]

After the birth of her first daughter, Santillana, ‘she felt more trapped’ because she ‘was a distraction who took time away from the day and night painting schedule that had been established before her birth.’^[6] She wondered whether Carlos would be able to withstand ‘the pressures from his family to take control of his wife and bring his daughter back into the family household.’ She could not be sure so ‘[w]ithin four months of their move to La Vibora, in May 1927, Alice packed her paints, bundled up her baby, and fled Havana, Cuba, and Carlos.’^[7]And with this dramatic illustration of where art can conflict with the demands of ordinary life I’ll pause for now. 

---

[1]. Collecting Souls – page 168.

[2]. Painter of Modern Life – page 124.

[3]. Collecting Souls – Page 73.

[4]. Ibid. – page 75.

[5]. Ibid. – page 78. 

[6]. Ibid. – page 81. 

[7]. Ibid. – page 82.

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Mapping Consciousness (5/6): Did Woolf succeed in capturing consciousness

Despite your illness you have never before done such well-balanced work, without sacrificing any feeling or any of the inner warmth demanded by a work of art, . . . .

Gauguin to van Gogh in 1890, quoted in the Penguin Letters of Vincent van Gogh – page 494

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, its relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable. Art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, so here it comes again!

Having inched my way to this point through art to illustrate what I was talking about, Woolf’s depression and possible transliminality, and whether she intended to convey our inscape or not, I can finally come to the crunch question.

Did Woolf succeed in capturing consciousness?

At this stage I can only base a carefully considered answer to that question on a complete reading of To the Lighthouse. I’m only halfway through The Waves.

This is where my own diary entries might come in useful, at least to explain the initial impact of To the Lighthouse.

Within the first 30 pages I was writing ‘there are already intriguing hints about Virginia Woolf‘s experience of consciousness, eg (page 28) ‘to follow her thought was like following your voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil… all of this danced up and down like a company of gnats… in Lilly’s mind.’

When I was halfway through, though I felt it was uneven, there were ‘many places where she achieves the almost impossible. She transitions from inscape to inscape.’ I think I need a fairly long example to illustrate this. Pages 97-98 provide a good one.

We begin in Mrs Ramsay‘s head, pitying Mr William Bankes:

. . . she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

“Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for you,” she said to William Bankes.

And suddenly we are in Lilly Briscoe’s mind which has a very different take on things:

Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon.

How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how remote. Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity him? For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his letters were in the hall. Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be saying, as if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her, her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And it was not true, Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s. He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work, Lily said to herself.

This leads Lily to recall her own true focus: painting.

She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That’s what I shall do. That’s what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the tablecloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.

I found that last moment an astute observation on Woolf’s part.

It seems to me that Woolf picks up skilfully on how one character sees another in a different way from that in which the person sees themselves. Where the truth lies is for the reader to decide.

I was getting completely carried away by this stage and wrote: ‘She is so astonishingly good at creating a convincing simulation of consciousness in To the Lighthouse. It’s as though I can experience some of her characters more clearly and completely then I experience aspects of myself.’

Conveying Consciousness

Reading Woolf was making me realise that having my primary focus on the nature of consciousness and the means to enhance it does not entail my turning my back, as I have over the last few years, on the novel. It simply provides me with the criterion by which to judge whether a novel really interests me. If it sheds no light on consciousness and is only concerned with plot and personality, then it is of no interest to me. Character and consciousness are key for me.

It raised a wider question. Is what I am after in a novel, poem or any written art form, the conveying of a state of mind? My reaction to Woolf suggests it is. At first I had thought that I shifted from studying literature to studying psychology because I was more interested in people in general than I was in the words that describe them. And that was true up to a point. Now I realise that I am not just interested in understanding people in ‘objective’ terms: I am also interested as much, if not more than anything else, in inner experience – something that psychological science and brain imaging cannot directly access, even if they can shed some light on how brain activity relates to inner experience and external action.

This goes beyond simply capturing routine streams of consciousness. I also believe there are aspects of reality that lie along a spectrum beyond our usual sensory settings. These can break through from the brain and its workings below ordinary consciousness, or break through from beyond the brain, from what I term a transcendent reality, whose exact nature tends to be defined in primarily metaphorical terms.

This raises a further question. Should the novel, drama and poetry be concerned with those, and to what extent? It even includes the question ‘Should a work of art, could a work of art, express some kind of world consciousness, a sense of our global interconnectedness at some level beyond the purely material?

How far does Woolf take it?

For now I will examine just how far Woolf goes with this in To the Lighthouse and to a lesser extent in The Waves.

At various points in the novel Woolf offers glimpses into how a character experiences their mind. I think it’s worth sharing some of these to indicate how broad her understanding is of these patterns.

Even the same character at different points has different experiences. Take Lilly, for example. At one time (page 168) ‘… a question like Nancy’s— opened doors in one’s mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do?’

At another (page 184):

Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.

And shortly after is something about as close as she comes to the mystical most of the time (page 186):

And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.

And there is one moment captured that must reflect Woolf’s own struggles as a writer (page 206):

Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind.

James, Mr Ramsay’s son, has another kind of experience (page 195):

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain…

And his combing of memory continues (page 214):

Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape.

Whether one of Lilly’s later thoughts is meant to capture a more final view is hard to say (page 224):

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

Maybe, maybe not, but there is something heroic about Woolf’s battle with herself and her material.

In any case, the clear balance in To the Lighthouse is tilted heavily in favour of the inner life as against external events, of which latter there are very few.

Even though I have still some way to go with The Waves, I can share one impression that is beginning to take shape in my mind.

This novel seems to be exploring in part at least the nature of the self. Whether there even is a self perhaps: Rhoda clearly doesn’t think so (page 47). ‘Identity failed me. We are nothing,’ she declares. Bernard is at something of an opposite extreme (pages 49-50): ‘I do not believe in separation. We are not single. . . . . we are one.’ He even sees his own self as multiple (page 56): ‘I am not one and simple, but complex and many.’ Neville feels connected but doesn’t like it (page 61): ‘How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.’

Bernard, of course, sees it differently (page 66): ‘For I am more selves than Neville thinks, We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.’

Louis is more of an outsider but people still bug him (page 69): ‘ People go on passing; they go on passing against the spires of the church and the plates of ham sandwiches. The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder.’ Susan on the other hand can feel more connected with nature (page 73): ‘I think sometimes . . . I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.’ Jinny, which incidentally was Woolf’s pet name, has a different take again. After dancing at a party her fancy takes off (pages 78): ‘I fill my glass again. I drink. The veils drop between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together on some high Alpine pass . . . There! That is my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over.’

I’m not sure yet where all this is going to lead in The Waves. What I see so far is an exploration of the poles of interconnectedness, an almost mystical concept, and isolation. This is a key aspect of consciousness for me and I am intrigued to see where she will take this theme. What I am still delighted by is her fusion of the poetic with the person, how she lifts language to a level where it almost becomes capable of doing justice to inner experience in a stable and consistent way. She can’t quite sustain it though and not all passages are equally convincing. Even so it is a rare and fine achievement.[1]

Where now?

There is another set of questions that I plan to explore next time: is success in the capturing of consciousness a valid standard by which to evaluate a work of art? Would it even be possible in such a diverse and global village as we live in now for a novelist to bring all shades and styles of consciousness together between the pages of one book? And when they failed how could that be seen as a defect? We are clearly only able to capture a small part of the spectrum. How much would we have to capture to be seen as a success?

I think there are ways of resolving the possibly specious problem raised by those questions.

More of that next time.

Footnote:

[1] I have now almost finished The Waves. Sadly I have to say that I do not find it as satisfying as To the Lighthouse. The forward to the Penguin Modern Classics edition expresses the problem with it clearly (page xxxiii): ‘Of all Woolf’s novels, The Waves is the one which most readily lays itself open to the charge of esoteric remoteness from the ordinary world.’ Even so it is a brave attempt to dramatise (page xi) ‘how identities themselves do not stand, ultimately, clear and distinct, but flow and merge into each other.’ Though her theme of ‘interconnectedness’ (page xii) strongly appeals to me I have to admit she does not satisfactorily achieve her aim in conveying it here for reasons which I hope to address in more detail in the last post of this sequence.

The Endless Enigma 1938 by Salvador Dali (the link for source of image no longer works)

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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

Even though it’s barely a year since I last republished this sequence, its relevance to my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation is unmistakable. Art, as well as science and religion, has a role to play in understanding consciousness, so here it comes again!

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.

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