Вирджиния Вулф – Jacob’s Room (страница 2)

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Needless to say, the Dreadnought Hoax planted the Bloomsbury Set in the public consciousness once and for all, as the oxygen of publicity was theirs to breathe in and enjoy. The hoax occurred on 7 February, 1910. Woolf’s first novel was begun the same year, although she did not publish until 1915, by which time she was already a minor celebrity.

Despite her subsequent success, Woolf was never particularly contented, however, for she had such a troubled soul and indefatigable mind. Today her malady would, doubtless, be described as a bipolar condition, for she oscillated from exuberant mood highs to despairing clinical lows. In the end, she was convinced that she would never come full circle again, so she decided to cut her loses while in the grip of a crushing depression that rendered her unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Virginia Woolf died in 1941, leaving behind a highly respected, progressive and considerable canon of essays, critique and novels.

Jacob’s Room

Jacob’s Room (1922) is an intriguing literary experiment by Woolf. She constructs a character by primarily piecing together the memories of others – notably, all of them female. Thus, the eponymous Jacob is never met directly by the reader. He is a fragmentary assemblage of information, which is ambiguous because the sources of information are subjective. Just as history is always an interpretation of past events, rather than the absolute truth, so Jacob’s personality is an interpretation, too.

From a literary point of view, Jacob’s Room is a vitally important contribution to the evolution of the novel. The plot is largely inconsequential to the book, because Woolf’s objective is based on wondering how we might get to know someone on the basis of circumstantial evidence. In effect, she plays a similar role to a police investigator building the profile of a dead or missing person. This makes for an intriguing concept, as it prompts the reader to wonder just how their own personality might be represented and assembled through other people’s reports and remnants of information. The abiding existential enquiry is whether anyone can be described accurately and truthfully. It makes us realise that most of what we are is hidden below the surface anyway, and what we reveal are only considered glimpses of the real complexity of our psychology. As a result, others have different perspectives on our characters, and we ourselves have a different perspective, based largely on how we would like to be viewed rather than how we are likely to be viewed.

Woolf’s work was a seminal event, because it opened the way for experimental forms of literature. Just as avant-garde painters and sculptors were finding new ways to utilise their media, so Woolf was doing similar things with her prose. We might think of Jacob’s Room as a form of artistic abstraction, leaving the reader to do some of the work just as they are expected to do so in a modern art gallery. Woolf had the mind of a progressive artist, wishing to do something new for the sake of pushing the boundaries and making the novel worthy of exploration as a genre, both for her and for the reader.

Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that groundbreaking creativity is always accessible or enjoyable. To appreciate frontline art, of any kind, it generally requires a combination of open-mindedness and an education in the movement concerned, which is why so many artists and writers often fail in this regard. In their defence, however, successful experimentation often requires the omission of familiar elements. In this case, plot and allegory are largely neglected to allow the author to focus on the experiment. As a result the story is imbued with a feeling of uncomfortable emptiness due to the constant absence of Jacob. Additionally, there is a very poignant ending, making it clear that Woolf was inspired by a theme familiar to many in the early 1920s: coming to terms with the loss of millions of men following the Great War. Unfortunately all of these lost men, too, became assemblages of memories.

Table of Contents

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

“… nothing for it but to leave,” she read.

“Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play” (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly—it was the third of September already), “if Jacob doesn’t want to play”—what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

“Where IS that tiresome little boy?” she said. “I don’t see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once.” “… but mercifully,” she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, “everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow. …”

Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Barfoot—many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector’s wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys’ heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

“Scarborough,” Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-brush.

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving—actually going to get up—confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies’ children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures—which they often did.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” Archer shouted.

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.

“I saw your brother—I saw your brother,” he said, nodding his head, as Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in spectacles.

“Over there—by the rock,” Steele muttered, with his brush between his teeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on Betty Flanders’s back.

“Ja—cob! Ja—cob!” shouted Archer, lagging on after a second.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black—it was just THAT note which brought the rest together. “Ah, one may learn to paint at fifty! There’s Titian …” and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off, and picked up her black parasol.

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top.

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fish darts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled crab—

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