Review of "Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two"

by Perry Meisel

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. By Angela Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 238 pp.

The friendship of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf has always been a provocative subject for critical speculation, particularly because the two share so much as writers. They met in 1916 and, by 1917, had begun an intense relationship that lasted until Mansfield died from consumption in 1923 at the age of only thirty-four. These years witness not just the production of the majority of the short stories upon which Mansfield's reputation is based, but also the change in Woolf's technique that begins in her own short fiction and in Jacob's Room (1922), and that comes to fruition in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Mansfield's writing, said Woolf when Mansfield died, "'was . . . the only writing I have ever been jealous of'" (p. 5).

Although Angela Smith's new book, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, does not press its case for influence – it must be dug out – it nonetheless provides adequate formulations to describe and account for how and why Mansfield and Woolf shared a personal intimacy and a common shop.¹ Mansfield and Woolf "mirror each other constantly," says Smith (p. 1), and they do so because both are preoccupied, in life and letters alike, by what Smith calls, following the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, an acute sense of "liminality" (pp. 4, 10) – of borders and border states.² While Mansfield's status as an outsider was the function of her colonial birth and upbringing in Wellington, New Zealand, Smith argues that, as women with a profession, both Mansfield and Woolf shared a preoccupation with being self-consciously on the edge. Nor did Woolf's privilege as Leslie Stephen's child matter much. Like the banker Harold Beauchamp, Stephen was a "roaring, brutal" father (p. 50) who made his daughter a colonial subject from within. Such commonality was exacerbated by the fact that both women were married to editors; Smith even shows how Leonard Woolf and John Middleton Murry carefully controlled their wives' posthumous reception. As Smith puts it, "the female writer could be rewritten by the male authority" (p. 52). They also shared what was perhaps the materially deepest "liminal" bond of all, that of being ill.

The principal focus of Smith's study, however, is not the biographies but the fiction of her critical protagonists. Yet here too Smith discovers the same preoccupation with liminality. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's notion of "the semiotic," the fluid, undifferentiated world of the mother-child relation before the onset of the Oedipus conflict and its inscription of the child into what, following Jacques Lacan, Kristeva calls the "symbolic" order, Smith shows how both Mansfield and Woolf not only experienced these two planes of life simultaneously but also juxtaposed their representation, with strategic intent, in their work. The result is nothing less than the invention of a new mode of writing and a new mode of reader response. Especially in the depiction of home life, it produces a feeling of defamiliarization, or of what Freud calls (in an essay written in 1919, at the height, coincidentally, of Woolf and Mansfield's friendship) "the uncanny" (p. 2).

Smith gives us a key to reading Mansfield's strategies by showing how her narratives are composed of modular units. Like the Woolfian narratives that Mansfield appears to have influenced more decisively than we hitherto have believed, Mansfield's stories have no privileged center of consciousness, whether that of character or of narrator. Indeed, they have no "consciousness" as such at all, since the focus is on personality's "unconscious" and, by definition, on its links to common structures, particularly ideological ones, that gird all the "selves" fashioned under given socioeconomic regimes. (Smith does not, however, point us to either Lacan or Louis Althusser for such clarification of her critical program.) Hence Mansfield can, as a writer, actually strive to "transform the symbolic order from the inside" (p. 92) by "destablilizing" (p. 151) the "script" (pp. 175, 180) of patriarchy that even female character is forced to read.

Smith's readings of Mansfield's "At the Bay" (1921) and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" (1922) are her most vivid instances of such "feminist rewriting" (p. 120).³ If "Prelude" (1918) is, with its "empty house" (p. 106), "the model for To the Lighthouse" (p. 93), then "At the Bay," with its action limited to a "single day" (p. 151), is the model for Mrs. Dalloway. As in Mrs. Dalloway, "linguistic motifs link . . . characters" (p. 158), motifs whose frequent psychopolitical imagery, like the phallic monumentalism of London's imperial architecture or the blade of Peter Walsh's knife, show the extent to which language itself is, as Lacan suggests, the symbolic order. In "At the Bay," "constructions of human experience" are "subjected to scrutiny and revealed as inadequate" (p. 163). While the Burnell family's women and children enjoy the jouissance of fluid relation when husband and father Stanley is in town at business, his return, like Mr. Ramsay's bluff appearances in To the Lighthouse, spells the doom of such playful exchange by centering everything, including the interpretation of speech acts, according to the code of the father's needs and demands.

The "contradictory representations of the self" (p. 164) that such shifting domestic rhythms give rise to, especially among the female characters, is not only responsible for tensions in the world of the Burnell household; they are also the technical contrivance upon which the narrative seizes in order to "disrupt . . . the prescripted texts that the characters are trying to live out" (p. 165). In "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," the death of the imperial father allows the unmarried, middle-aged daughters to be "released from the patriarchal presence" (p. 217) as "one script becomes another" (p. 219). Because life is played out in representations, the fiction writer can intervene in its ordering premises at will by simply "destabilizing" the normative procedures of representation itself.

Smith's reading of Woolf offers little in the way of surprise, but the argument for influence is convincing. It does not impugn Woolf's own originality; rather, it shows how Mansfield helped Woolf to become herself. Unlike her rote feminist decoding of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighhouse, Smith's handling of Jacob's Room refreshes our appreciation of the novel by demonstrating its pivotal place in Woolf's development in a new way. What is new is the influence of Mansfield. Smith's account of the emergence of what she calls Woolf's "mobile method" (p. 140) in her transitional stories, particularly "A Mark on the Wall" (1917) and "Kew Gardens" (1919), prepares the ground. In Jacob's Room, "incongruous pictures jostle each other" (p. 194), notably the juxtaposition of Jacob's patriarchy and his consequent "security as a privileged reader" (p. 214), and the novel's "chorus of . . . women" (p. 120), who present alternative reading practices and whose representation is controlled by alternative tropologies. "The narrator plays with . . . archetypal roles," both "undermining" and sustaining them (p. 210).

Liminality is, however, a largely self-evident way to describe what Woolf and Mansfield share, and a rather commonsensical way of approaching their relation. Apart from demonstrating Mansfield's preponderant influence, Smith's study carries few discoveries. But adding to it, as Smith does, the presumable authority of Kristeva also makes her a bit wooden and uninspiring. It is one thing to borrow a useful distinction such as that between the semiotic and the symbolic in order to get things going. It is quite another to invoke Kristeva again and again. The cranky machinery of the Kristevan system confuses more than it clarifies. Even the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic leads to an epistemological cul-de-sac that a critic with structural presuppositions like Smith, or, indeed, like Kristeva herself, should be suspicious of. It requires valorizing the notion of natural rhythms as opposed to social ones and linking the "rhythms of the female body with cyclic time" (p. 222). This is the unreflective side of French feminism and the point at which it cannot sustain the ironies that brought it into being. Kristeva's work is really a displacement of her literary anxieties; the opposition of the semiotic and the symbolic is really the opposition of Melanie Klein and Lacan in her critical unconscious. Above all, it valorizes the very anthropomorphism – the romantic practice of prosopopoeia – that Mansfield, Woolf, and late romantic modernism as a whole characteristically put into question.

Such a difficulty points to a larger problem. We have reached a moment of uncanniness in literary criticism as a whole today, when the interrogation of the hegemonic has, with some irony, itself become the rule. A Public of Two is both an investigation of such uncanniness in the work of Mansfield and Woolf, and an instance of it in its own critical practice. Smith can read well enough when she is free of the shadow of the theoretical authority. Why invoke it so stentorianly when when its tenets are now common knowledge?

Notes

1. There have been combined studies of Mansfield and Woolf, but none, Smith argues, presents the full picture to which hers aspires. See Ronald Hayman, Literature and Living: A Consideration of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (London: Covent Garden, 1972); Nora Sellei, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Frankfurt: Lang, 1996); and Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

2. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

3. Both were included in The Garden Party (1922); Smith, however, does not date the stories despite the biographical demands of her argument.

Originally published in Modern Philology, Volume 100, Number 1, August 2002

In Exile

by Perry Meisel

I met Robert Christgau in the fall of 1975, fresh out of graduate school at Yale, and teaching as an assistant professor of English at NYU. I had written rock and jazz criticism for Crawdaddy and The Boston Phoenix, and had had excellent editors – John Swenson and Ben Gerson. Christgau, however, was different; he was the Dean of American Rock Criticism. Nor was it, as every rock critic knows deep down, an inappropriate moniker.

As I crossed Eighth Street that afternoon, going from my office at NYU up University Place to the Voice, the autumn air was suddenly fresher. I had left my academic colleagues behind – puffy men gnawing their prejudices with ghastly satisfaction. Real criticism beckoned. We talked mostly about jazz-rock "fusion," a big but dubious thing at the time. Stanley Clarke. Grover Washington. The singing George Benson. "Do you really like this stuff?" he asked.

Not entirely, I replied. I'm ambivalent about it. It regrets its rocking impulses too much. But it's a historical inevitability. It simply hasn't been done right. There's a grammar of pop that demands it. Maybe somebody besides Miles Davis will figure it out.

He kindled. The conversation had begun. He sent me off to review Larry Coryell at the Village Gate. Talk about ambivalence! I sweated like hell, almost as much as Coryell himself did, trying to reconcile his funk drives with his learning. This wasn't just the central tension in jazz-rock "fusion"; it was also the central tension in rock criticism, especially on my end.

I pored over Any Old Way You Choose It umpteen times, languishing in its cadences and doing my damnedest to get "personal" the way Bob did. After all, I was, despite my earlier music writing and even my long experience playing saxophone in paying bands, an "academic" critic who had been taught to keep the hogs out back, where they belong. Now I wanted a snout of my own. God, could that man clear up a sentence! And my own voice more expressive! Hard to believe that I could learn to hit a ride cymbal in stride.

But to think of Christgau as a foil to the academy would be misleading. He reminded me, that first day, of my younger teachers at Yale – scrupulous, learned, but easygoing men with a wink in their eyes. The wink signaled a tacit understanding that the Shakespeare you were discussing today and the Howard Hawks film you'd seen last night were made of the same cloth. "High" and "low" culture were not just continuous; they had complex historical connections so overdetermined as to make your head spin. For all his ambivalence about the academy, and about the new literary theory in particular, Christgau was, at heart, a structuralist, and had been long before structuralism was En Vogue. Whether it was James Taylor or Edward Taylor, performance was performance, scholarship was scholarship. John Milton was as worth your while as Little Milton. Bob called it "democratic culture." I called it "semiotics." Our epistemologies matched, just like our glasses.

Trained at Dartmouth as a New Critic, Christgau joined a tradition beginning with Marshall Stearns at Yale and Martin Williams at Penn of "close readers" who, on their own, working with "pop" materials in a literary rather than an anthropological way, discovered that form was enabling rather than repressive. Literary rather than anthropological. That is key. While Yale drop-out John Hammond may have dabbled in racial stereotyping while promoting the blues, even Hammond was formalist in his leanings rather than moralistic. The "expressions" of black America, charted originally as the "folkways" of the sociologist W.E.B. DuBois and the (let us not forget) anthropologically trained Nora Zeale Hurston, were now a formal system – art, with all its self-consciousness, rather than the raw data of suffering. Ralph Ellison, as a critic, gave particular authority to this new approach. By the 1950s, jazz criticism had thereby prepared the ground for rock criticism.

The Voice was, and still is, an academy in exile. If, as Bob avers, Richard Goldstein had invented rock criticism, he systematized and institutionalized it, using New Journalist techniques to describe its tensions firsthand. In addition to the birthing of the New Journalism, from Mailer to Goldstein, the paper's influence includes that seachange in cultural assumption represented by rock criticism as a whole. The very materials of rock criticism obliterate any presumable difference between "high" and "low." For Christgau, it is not just a question of gentlemanly winks. It is a public intellectual question to be played out and resolved in journalism rather than in the pages of Renaissance Quarterly or Representations.

Invariably operating to the latter's discredit, the divide between "high" and "low" has a long history, from Matthew Arnold, who largely invented it, to F.R. Leavis, who gave his prejudices an avuncular twist so as to make them appear common-sensical and benign. This history's apogee is Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in Partisan Review. Even T.W. Adorno, friend of the worker, is a brick-headed snob on the subject. The assumption that the "popular" is kitsch," or trash, to use Greenberg's notorious appellation, is the same as the assumption that black artistic production is expression, not craft. Nor is Sontag's "camp" very much better. It assumes that someone still has a "superior" perspective. The elementary lessons of semiotics, apprehended early on by Ellison, a disciple of Kenneth Burke, somehow escaped the doyens of Partisan Review. All human activity is, to use Burke's prescient phrase, "symbolic action" – discourses with dialectical histories. No wonder the murder of the conservative approach to culture had come from "pop" music criticism, from its origins in jazz criticism to its apotheosis in rock.

More and more I understand one of Bob's most singular remarks to me. One day, after I had sung the praises of some half-assed band, he looked at me with a puzzled smile. "You see more in mediocre music," he said, "than anyone I know." I was moved. I took it as a compliment. I love the "mediocre" – not the bad, mind you, or the corrupt, but what the dictionary says the "mediocre" is: the "commonplace," the middle, etymologically, of the mountain; good old MOR. Here you see "genre," or form, at its purest, plus the tug-of-war between capitulation and revolt that comes from making its demands paramount. Hence my delight in jingles, in TV theme songs. Just check out the sequence of the themes to Banacek, Miami Vice, and Law and Order for a very considerable historical dialectic that the shows themselves act out in dramatic terms.

"High" culture itself actually created the problem of "mediocrity" by making the artist's struggle against past forms the center of Romanticism. Keats in particular initiates this tradition; he is rock and roll's original poet, the first Buddy Holly or Brian Jones. The continuity between "high" and "pop" is often exact to a fault.

Originally published in Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: Essays in Honor of Robert Christgau. Edited by Tom Carson, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon. Austin: Nortex Press, 2002.