" Spasms of wonder, of discovery"
Virginia Woolf, on James Joyce's Ulysses
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Green Gartside, Smash Hits, June 1982.
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The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption...
“I should be reading ‘Ulysses,’ and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Tom, great Tom [T.S. Eliot], thinks this is on a par with ‘War and Peace’! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.”
ReplyDeleteWoolf's more famous assessment of Ulysses
Haha I read that as your opinion at first! Missed the quotation marks.
DeleteWhere does that other quote come from?
I actually have that Woolf quote earlier on this very blog, if I remember right!
DeleteI'm not sure where the 'spasms of wonder' thing is from, in some ways it would work just as well - or better, even - as a freefloating phrase, rather than tied to Ulysses
Actually I have a bunch of things she said about Joyce / Ulysses https://thinkigekru2.blogspot.com/2023/09/virginia-woolf-privately-dissing-james.html
DeleteI agree "spasms of wonder" is just lovely in isolation. But I have also been fascinated by Woolf recently.
DeleteI looked the quote up, and it comes from Woolf's diary in January 1941, just a couple of months before she died. Right up until the end she was still grappling with Joyce.
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole on the Woolf-Joyce beef, there's a couple of great blog posts here:
https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/woolfs-reading-of-james-joyces-ulysses-1918-1920/
And here:
https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/woolfs-reading-of-joyces-ulysses-1922-1941/
On the subject of Woolf, I recently came across this passage in Orlando which fits in your collection of readings on glam:
ReplyDelete"He possessed, now that he was in the prime of life, the power to stir the fancy and rivet the eye which will keep a memory green long after all that more durable qualities can do to preserve it is forgotten. The power is a mysterious one compounded of beauty, birth, and some rarer gift, which we may call glamour and have done with it. 'A million candles', as Sasha had said, burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.
He moved like a stag, without any need to think about his legs. He spoke in his ordinary voice and echo beat a silver gong. Hence rumours gathered round him. He became the adored of many women and some men. It was not necessary that they should speak to him or even that they should see him; they conjured up before them especially when the scenery was romantic, or the sun was setting, the figure of a noble gentleman in silk stockings.
Upon the poor and uneducated, he had the same power as upon the rich. Shepherds, gipsies, donkey drivers, still sing songs about the English Lord 'who dropped his emeralds in the well', which undoubtedly refer to Orlando, who once, it seems, tore his jewels from him in a moment of rage or intoxication and flung them in a fountain; whence they were fished by a page boy.
But this romantic power, it is well known, is often associated with a nature of extreme reserve. Orlando seems to have made no friends. As far as is known, he formed no attachments."
That's a great quote - "a million candles" - love it. I'll have to put that up on the Shock and Awe blog.
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