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VLugnan-5A- analysis of the extract from
by - (2012-01-12)
Up to 5 A - Modernist Fiction: V. Woolf and J. Joyce
Analysis of the extract from "The Common Reader"
The present extract is taken from "The Common Reader", a collection of essays written in 1925 by Virginia Woolf. It is about the way the novelists should write fiction.
Argumentation starts with a statement that shows the reader the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels. It carries on with V. Woolf's opinion about that: according to her traditional fiction misses to express what life is really like up to now. It follows that the sense of life cannot be rendered any longer in such novels. The use of "any longer" means that years ago traditional fiction was suitable to express reader's needs, but now the situation has changed, because people are looking for the "life or spirit, truth or reality, the essential thing".
Nevertheless V. Woolf does not state that traditional novelists do not make efforts, on the contrary she marks their effort using words and expressions such as: constructing, two and thirty, labour (work that hurts too) and so on. But their labour is not useful because it "ceases to resemble the vision in our minds", that is it ceases to resemble our ideas and it hides the true essence of life. The word "cease" is different from "finish", because it reminds death.
As a consequence novelists are constrained by a "tyrant" and not by their free will. All that means they seem compelled to follow some standards and conventions: "they provide a plot, comedy, tragedy, love interest and an air of probability (giving the idea that something like stories told, could really happen in our life). It follows that if all the figures of traditional novels would come to life "they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the our", therefore the reader has no possibility to imagine something, because everything is already described.
Besides, V. Woolf goes on with her argumentation asking rhetorically if novels must really be like this. The answer is of course " no" and the reason is that life is very far from being like this. Everyday the mind receives a lot of different impressions, it follows that there are no standards. Therefore each writer should be free to convey his own feelings even beyond any convention. As a consequence "no plot, no comedy, no tragedies, no love interest" would exist and people would be free to shape images in their mind up to their will.
To conclude the argumentation, she expresses her ideas of life:
LIFE is "not as a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,
but as a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us".
All that implies life is not something symmetrical, having conventions of its own, but rather somethinglike a is semi-transparent (--> you cannot perfectly see all perspectives of whatr reality reality is. In addition she affirms that the task of the novelist is to convey the spirit, even if it may be difficult, mixing it with external life.