The Process of Creation
ARENSBERG, SUSAN
The Process of Creation VIRGINIA WOOLF AND HER WORKS By Jean Guiguet Translated from the French by Jean Stewart Harcourt, Brace & World 488 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by SUSAN ARENSBERG Reviewer,...
...But he does not show that language itself, in a multitude of guises, brings Woolf to that point...
...and that is the way that leads to poetry...
...Each character's central being is formed from images, and to show how a person develops through life, Woolf varies and expands those images...
...Although Guiguet does discuss generally the poetry of The Waves, he does not show precisely how Virginia Woolf makes this book a "single being in search of voices," as he puts it...
...that "anguish" haunts everything Woolf wrote, either for herself or for the public...
...But he rarely treats the striking particular aspects of her poetic language...
...It is true, however, that Woolf still faces such hostile criticism...
...He is right...
...Even in the last section, where he gathers the works, connects and contrasts them in terms of such basic problems as time and space, consciousness, and structure, he emphasizes how Virginia Woolf developed her treatment of them...
...she continually "broke and re-formed the shell of beauty...
...All questions are finally unanswerable...
...Mad music...
...But such criticism is really only another small battle, since Guiguet's work is excellent, not only in general but in the myriad details he covers as well...
...As critic he chooses to stand beside her, not away from her...
...the chink of gold and metal...
...will last for ever...
...The "moment" is eternal and gone: "This has gone on for ever...
...And if a phrase or an instant of meaning and oneness with others "nets things under," order and beauty slip back into broken dreams, flux and separateness...
...One remembers, and beyond remembering, one glimpses in the last section several new emphases that are a tribute to Guiguet's mastery at isolating elements of Woolf's art...
...It is language, or sound, that forms Virginia Woolf's vision of everything leading to the simple words, "They spoke" and silence...
...They rose, became menacing, and shook their fists at you...
...In discussing chronologically the nine novels ("nine different versions of the same book," as he puts it), Guiguet systematically explores the merit of each, examining the genesis, presenting a summary, and then measuring it against the author's conception...
...Her creative process, as she described it in A Writer's Diary, is Jean Guiguet's abiding interest, the pivot of his critical theory and technique, and the weapon he draws to battle other critics...
...While she was not an ivory tower esthete as some have charged, beauty was part of her vision...
...Again and again he asserts that Virginia Woolf is not an ivory tower esthete, not a stylist in search of conventions, not a snob...
...the elephant with its foot chained...
...In "The Self, Life and Artistic Creation" Guiguet shows her as an artist responding to a "rhythm and alteration" between periods of close, grueling work and easy, lighthearted activity...
...and there is Isa's torment: "But none speaks with a single voice...
...There is no "truth" anywhere as simple or persistent as this...
...I shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple...
...And in one battle he arrives at a truth crucial to any reader of Virginia Woolf: He says that her core problem was anguish, "that feeling of the threat that hangs around the moment, of the precarious nature of vision which extends to the whole being, since the whole being is basically that vision...
...The book is crossed with lyricism and humor, imagery and fact, alliteration, rhymed sentences, broken phrases-melodies and cacaphony in prose...
...All gold, flowing that way, I say to that one, 'Come.'" Susan said, "I love, I hate...
...And Virginia Woolf's art, bringing a universe to order under an anguished poetic consciousness, demands and deserves the fierce sympathy he gives it...
...I am rooted to the middle of the earth...
...As an young man, he said, "My roots go down through veins of lead and silver, through damp, marshy places...
...Guiguet's critical theory and technique-so careful, thorough and sympathetic without being bland- is on its own terms irreproachable...
...Guiguet's discussion of Between the Acts is concerned mainly with the end-with the fact that all fantasy and life lead to the abyss of stark emotion and unprotected silence...
...He attributes the fact that linny is recognizably different from Susan only to the author's "skill...
...Now for the first time, a literary critic has tried to thoroughly explore what this simple, enormous statement meant to her and how that "universe" was shaped in each of her novels...
...daffodils that come before the swallow dares.' Perhaps this problem of words in themselves is both too self-evident and too detailed a subject for the large scope of work like Guiguet's, yet one would have liked more quotations from the novels and more than intimations that their language is poetic...
...I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell-after dining with Roger for instance...
...It has been 25 years since Virginia Woolf died, and Guiguet's large, comprehensive work has the reflection and scholarship possible with such distance...
...Quoting excerpts from the diary, he delves into her life from 1929 to 1931, when she was writing her greatest novel, The Waves...
...there is the inner harmony that Lucy Swithin hears...
...Bartholomew muses: "Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence...
...There are tunes from the squeaky gramaphone, which at different times summon, distract and finally unite a puzzled audience at the end of the play...
...The echoing imagery, then, is crucial to anything said about this "mystical, eyeless" book...
...Virginia Woolf thought in images...
...He does fully recognize her desire for poetry: "All her quest, all her efforts were devoted to the elimination of wasted time, to the expression of pure intensity...
...He fulfills his intentions, and if one knows Virginia Woolf every page reflects her image...
...Virginia Woolf also conveys implicitly the characters' multiple being, which is linked to the symbolic day of the Interludes, by having all of them voice each other's imagery and fragments from the interludes...
...Al-ways I hear corrupt murmurs...
...and the author also knows her very well...
...From this base come the intimations of music that fill the novel...
...Knowing that her poetic visions framed the most enormous questions (for all lives), one wonders why he even admits such small battles...
...Although this precarious vision exists in the life of all her novels, her strength is the fact that as an artist, she did change her way of imparting that vision...
...There is no distortion...
...This, therefore, is by far the fullest commentary on Virginia Woolf to date...
...As a child Louis said, "The beast stamps...
...Beyond life is silence: "A vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence...
...And there are the disjointed rhymes of the audience remarks...
...goes down to the bottom of the world-this moment I stand on...
...She wrote once, "Art is being rid of all preachings: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas...
...Virginia Woolf merely lived with it closer to the nerve than most people, and she fought the "insensate rush of things" to create moments of still meaning...
...So the music is all the reveries and talk of human beings who are surrounded by the silence of the landscape and the sky...
...The only strange quality in Guiguet's assiduous care and almost lyric sympathy is his defensiveness...
...she did "play with words...
...Sealed and blind, with each stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumors of war...
...This applies particularly to Guiguet's study of The Waves and Between the Acts, where even the interpretation suffers a little from his neglect...
...Thus the scheme of the book emphasizes Woolf's perspective on her own writing...
...The core of that skill is imagery: linny said, "I am rooted, but I flow...
...Reviewed by SUSAN ARENSBERG Reviewer, Virginia Kirkus Service Virginia Woolf once wrote of herself, "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order...
...My body is a stalk...
...and her vision is as much the strange patterns of image, sound and rhythm she wove as it is the larger forms of a novel's structure...
...Most other critics of Woolf, including two of the most important, Bernard Blackstone and David Daiches, wrote either during her lifetime or shortly after and none had access to A Writer's Diary, published in 1953...
...In the chapters on her criticism, short stories, essays, and biography he adopts Woolf's own view of these genres as tangential comments on the art of the novel...
...Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous...
...Using the words of Valéry, Guiguet says he wishes to study her merit (the author's achievement in terms of her own purposes) as opposed to her value (her achievement in terms of the reader's standards...
...Sometimes Guiguet neglects the poet in Woolf as he traces out her vision...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 20
