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Jacobs Room (changes)

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Folks

• Jacob, our “hero,” difficult to read into; incipient man; distinguished-looking; shy, cynical

• Bonamy, his probably gay friend, v jealous but loves Jacob

• Clara Durrant, sister of his friend Timothy; Jacob’s respectable love-interest; very sweet

• Florinda, Jacob’s first fling; a tart, really really, sent to devastate any romanticism he might’ve been born with

• Fanny Elmer, another love-interest; an artist’s model for the Slade; our London flaneuse

• Sandra Wentworth Williams, the final love-interest, a bored wife who looks for fun by seducing Englishmen for romantic scenes, with a collection of books by which she marks her previous marks; yuck
  • Her scenes are like a bad Forster novel all of the sudden conquering the book like a tumor at the end: the danger of narrative, being drug into action, esp. typical action.

• Betty Flanders, Jacob’s mother, a widow but with her consolations (Captain Barfoot’s visits); forgetful and very sympathetic

• John and Archer, his brothers

• Professor Huxtable, the Cambridge professor with ideas marching like an orderly army

Themes

• War/soldiers: the echo of war (esp in form of processions and human behavior that looks like marching or looks like military discipline) throughout the book

• Public Spectacle: like Mrs. Dalloway, this book has lots of royal processions and demonstrations that create a unified public, if only temporarily:
  • 176: We see the link among the antiproductive arms of civilization: they “are the strokes that oar the world forward,” ie, are supposed to be about progress (the army, plus “banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business”)

• Beauty versus Mind: Jacob’s first crisis of humanity: How can Florinda be so beautiful yet so stupid?
  • Sex is independent of the mind, and it scares him to see that there’s another type of value in the world that he has a hard time resisting
  • ”...he knew that cloisters and classics are of no use whatever. The problem is insoluble.” (90)

• Moments of Being: the desire to “gallop intemperately,” the mood of exaltation that alternates with depression for Jacob (159)

• Letters: the amazing section where she shows the cynicism that alights from constant communication: it doesn’t seem to do anything for you, and it seems like dull routine

• Leisure Spaces: Good accounts of the daily life/normal experiences of leisure spaces, such as mass entertainments of London and cafes, but the coolest little factoid about it is that Jacob risks becoming part of a traditional narrative when he goes traveling and almost gets caught by this woman hungering for the romantic experiences made available by travel; also, Hampstead Garden Suburb (132)

• A list of other themes : city (as not as good as moors; but then again it’s awesome); time as treasure; gossip; cleanliness; clothes; inescapable history; importance of trifles; trifles (91: the paper flowers which expand in water as affecting romantic futures of multiple people, ie Kitty marrying Stuart b/c of his bon mot about them); skeleton/flesh (strategies of protecting oneself); transitoriness of epiphany (you forget it, cf Sandra); class; determinism; empire empire; coin metaphors; shopping/flaneuse; feminism (ie the section in the British Museum where the lady scholar notices how there isn’t “an Eliot or a Bronte” amid the golden circle of literary names on the dome of the Reading Room 118)

Style

• Nonfiction info from Woolf’s diary/letters
  • Diary entry 1920, about goals for this novel: “looseness and lightness” will help her get “closer” to her topic: “no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen;” “bright as fire in the mist,” “gaiety,” “inconsequence”
    • And yet “a light spirited stepping at my sweet will” so it is about her control
  • Letter after it was written: “Narrative business of the novelist: getting from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional” whereas she wants to get to “poetry” ONLY
• Problem: How to “create” Jacob without relying on false pretense of knowledge?
  • Source: unknowability of people
    • 174, 30: “It is no use trying to sum someone up.” Need new form!
      • 30: “Nobody sees anyone as he is;” about a woman who sees Jacob on the train, “one must do the best one can with her report.”
      • 52: “But whether this was the right interpretation of Jacob’s gloom…it is impossible to say.”
    • 78: “unknown” is the “just” evaluation of our fellow humans because “life is just a procession of shadows” (Plato). “For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing.”
    • 79: Even if you carefully note actions and behaviors, “But though all of this may very well be true…there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself.” (and not by language!)
  • Source: Limits of language
    • “It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it—that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn by ribbons.” (176 right after an explanation that the progress of Western civ is done by banks, businesses, government, armies, and policeman, which makes the world a manifestation of the WILL of these workers to control themselves and thus end up controlling the world.
      • We know Woolf agreed with this statement when applied to writers like Bennett and Galsworthy…and I don’t think she knows yet if she’s been able to do it.
    • “of all the futile occupations this of cataloguing features is the worst. One word is sufficient. But if one cannot find it?” (77)
• Solutions
  • Jacob’s Room: his objects
    • Cambridge room 39-40: has stuff readily available for purchase by any Cambridge undergrad: not helpful
    • London flat: 72: unlike all the “multitude,” (“They have no houses. The streets belong to them.”) he has a private study
    • London flat: 108: As the way to solve the problems of narrative: she’s talking about books “What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages—oh, here is Jacob’s room.” But we only see him fiercely reading the newspaper: people are not show-dogs who will give up their identities so easily!!
    • I don’t think this strategy worked in the traditional sense: Repetition: 76-7, 200: the same way to describe the rooms comes at the middle and at the end of the book: we have learned nothing new, nothing further.
      • THE QUESTION: Even if you have the access of an omniscient narrator, what does it get you???
  • Source: life is apparently all about interruptions, chaos, etc
    • See Fanny Elmer’s walk through Hampstead Garden Suburb, a socialist experiment by a woman, est 1907, to make a livable community with mixed-use buildings and lots of greenery, and even church bells not allowed—but the dogs bark, the motor-cars are too loud, the sun is too hot, and kids are screaming: No Matter How You Plan (whether a community or a life or a book), You Can’t Control for Everything
    • Woolf must find the connecting thread!
  • Another Problem: contingency and chaos of life, and choice is hard
    • 170: Jacob is trying to think amazing things about Greek culture whilst at the Parthenon, which could become the basis for a life-work that will secure fame and reputation, but instead he’s interrupted by French tourist women
    • Something always prevents people from thinking the profound (ie, Sandra forgets her profound thoughts about the rich, the poor, and giving in to struggle)
    • He is constantly up and down, exalted and depressed, never calm, but blown by the wind
    • How to Solve: You Must Choose: In the theatre, there’s so much to see: “The observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification [the theatre arranged by class].... But the difficulty remains—one has to choose [one’s identity, you have to choose your identity].” (75)
      • Resonance: Just like choosing identity, the writer has to choose details to make sense of the chaos. “We must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster.” (75)
• Experiments
  • New Type of Narrator
    • Minimal Background Info
      • Doesn’t entirely eliminate all background info, but it is minimal.
      • Stylistically, instead of giving it all at beginning in a big nice chunk, scattered, short, and integrated seamlessly with other parts of book (ie, description, action, dialogue)
      • 82 a crisis w/out
      • 100 trivial info
    • Doesn’t Give Full Conversations (53, 71) or full descriptions or details about everyone
    • Hard to follow: you don’t know immediately what the narrator is talking about or who the narrator is following or talking about: you have to “catch up”
      • 79 does experiment w/typography
      • Narrator isn’t the reader’s baby-sitter: wants to deny authority, isn’t in authority, isn’t responsible for organizing; “I’m just showing, and you interpret.”
      • 64 the dinner party at Mrs. Durrant’s, where the conversation isn’t focused or explained, but instead everything is described at once (ie, you hear two conversations at the same time and have to figure out who’s talking to whom; narr doesn’t tell you who leaves or enters the scene but you must induct it by yourself)
    • Playful, teasing, poking fun
      • Not serious; not so attached to characters (cf George Eliot); teases Jacob (no hero)
      • “Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to set that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your friends.” (119) (she’s critical of the stuff she showed in Night and Day)
      • “The magnificent world—the live, sane, vigorous world…. These words refer to the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn in January between two and three in the morning.” (124)
      • Shows how we make generalizations based on the absurdly specific
      • Does she really think happy moods are meaningless? no, but that doesn’t mean they are Truth, either
    • Mocking Jacob’s judgmental confidence and the obligatory worship of the Greeks: “The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt.” (153)
    • Jacob thinks Sandra is contemplating the world, right and wrong, but really she’s just thinking that he’s attractive (164): disillusionment is just around the corner for him if he keeps living (even though he’s already started the process, he’s not quite there yet)
  • Casual Tone: Mocks Writing Itself
    • “Betty Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime” (11). Directly makes fun of reader’s expectations: “of course” and teasing us with not telling us all this info that is supposedly circulating
    • Lack of certainty 47: “it may be,” “sometimes,” “about midnight”
    • Reflects actual circumstances of speech: not all said is perfect language (Jacob constantly seen as murmuring something unintelligible: 48: “And perhaps Jacob only said, ‘hum’ or said nothing at all”)
    • 30-1: “anyhow:” contingent, lack of design, not trying to claim universality
      • 30: “One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up.”
      • 31: “They say the sky is the same everywhere…. But above Cambridge—anyhow above the roof of King’s College Chapel—there is a difference.” (Wants to argue for specificity, the contingent, but also chafes against the irrelevance, the unimportance that this specificity seems to bring with it. If you’re generalizing, it’s Majestic, but wrong; if you’re specific, it’s Correct, but ignoble. How to make the specific meaningful? that is the problem.)
    • In describing the random sights outside of Jacob’s Cambridge window: “But this was a diversion.” (45)
      • She’s fighting with what should be included: soon, she will not apologize for showing the supposedly unrelated and unimportant.
    • 140: “For example, take this scene.” (doesn’t hide the analytical, argumentative side of writing)
    • 142: “Then here is another scrap of conversation.” (doesn’t fake cohesion)
    • 182: “But to return to Jacob and Sandra.” (getting wearing of this narrative job with its responsibilities.)
  • Random Characters
    • We meet people not entirely due to their significance in Jacob’s life, but instead their spatial proximity to him.
    • It is a spatial way of accounting for character: you are who surrounds you.
    • Results in jarring juxtaposition of the high, middle, and low (esp when we hear about the charwoman next door to Jacob and Bonamy talking their serious talk; the violet seller Moll Pratt outside Countess Lucy’s window)
  • Jumps Impressionism in Space and Time
    • A radical focalization, where for example Betty’s tears make it look like a ship is about to capsize b/c mast is “waving” through her tears (page 1)
    • 55: literal impressionism, in description of sunset (“leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow”
  • Lack of Impressionism
    • Yet Woolf also has moments of objectivism: “the kitchen table when you’re not there” (Lighthouse)
    • Sometimes, intensely focalized passages are juxtaposed with completely objective descriptions: 40 the unfocalized description of Jacob’s room (cataloguing the objects there), followed by a description of what’s happening outside Jacob’s room as filtered through his consciousness as he looks out the window
    • 7 (the front room in Scarborough during the hurricane, as the light falls outside on child’s bucket)
    • 52: the unobserved is just as important as the observed: “The cat marches across the heart-rug. No one notices her,” yet the narrator thinks it’s key to the passage. Woolf won’t be a straight impressionist: there is something outside the human mind.
    • 101: suggests why this objective view matters: b/c it doesn’t use moral judgment: “The sitting-room neither knew nor cared.” (This is about Jacob’s affair with Florinda, which the narrator tells us his mother would abhor.) It doesn’t commit the mistake of judgment. (Which is why one would use it to describe death and events of WWI in Lighthouse.)
  • Fragmentation
    • Lack of transition or connection between adjacent passages
    • Some passages are very short, others very long
  • Jumps in Space and Time
    • In the middle of a passage, will keep one or the other the same, but change the other (ie, we’re still on the moor where Mrs. Flanders is, but all of the sudden we’ve been pushed back 500 years) (or, in the same moment of time, we in three separate but consecutive paragraphs see someone in Greece, someone in London, someone in Scarborough)
      • Different from typical jumps in novels, where a break in the middle of the page is the conventional sign for a change in place and time
    • 72-3: A sudden zoom, a pinpoint, where general description of the Underground all of the sudden yields to specificity, all of the sudden to a single person’s bedroom: “Only at one point…does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom.”
  • Focus on the Mundane
    • On London, far from the “melancholy medieval mists:” “the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.” (185)
  • Repetition
    • Not the soulless killer of beauty and romance, repetition for Woolf shows what keeps the world together, the thread that organizes life and prevents it from being meaningless.
    • Repetition creates cyclical time, creating whatever stable identity we have, and creates links among disparate characters who think the same thing
    • Our random character, Mrs. Lidgett, in St. Pauls: “the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide” when she’s there… And yet at the end of the passage, Woolf repeats this phrase to apply to everyone “man, woman, man, woman boy,” all the people who come in: “the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide” (72)
    • British Museum
      • 121: Woolf repeats “an enormous mind” to describe British Museum, which is so big that it is “beyond the power of any single mind to possess it” (her repetition focuses on the collective mind!)
      • 122: “Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street” who is drunk and loud (our cultural inheritance is the thread that connects our history, all civilization, together)
    • 139: repetition of “it all came from Tom Jones,” where Fanny thinks Jacob’s mystique and culture come from, and finally ending with, “Still, there lay Tom Jones.”
      • Content: meant to show difference between the two, even to the extent that Fanny doesn’t rightly understand the true source of their differences (which I don’t think the narrator claims to know)
      • Significance: repetition is a litany form where you try to convince yourself of something: it’s soothing, tends to cause belief and dependence
    • Creating character: 177, Evan Williams (husband of the aesthetic flirt Sandra), thinks three or four times about how “Never was there a time when the country had more need of men,” which depresses him. It makes character a linguistic operation! (you are what you think)
    • 199: Right before Jacob dies, we have two sets of repetition: first, we hear again the description of Greek women around Parthenon at dusk (the first instance was a few chapters ago, so it’s “external repetition” I’d call it; and second, an “internal repetition” where in this same passage it’s repeated: that the “nocturnal women were beating great carpets.” Even though life changes, esp with this death, it still goes on. Soothing: life isn’t just about Jacob.
    • 200: Narrator says the same thing about Jacob’s room, the same three sentences about the beauty of 18th century architecture; and also the same things happen outside of Jacob’s room (“Pickford’s van swung round the corner”). So, we know nothing new or deeper about Jacob despite being occupied with him for 200 pages. Kind of depressing. But the repetition has convinced us that there hasn’t actually been a loss: the rhythm of the world is still the same.
  • Indirect Discourse
    • Jacob’s meditations at the beginning of his journey to Greece (154-8) are indistinct, very difficult to interpret: we can’t figure out if Jacob is thinking it or if the narrator thinks it (judgment about illusions of civilization, if we should be gloomy, what to make of our emotional rollercoasters) b/c of indirect discourse
    • Solves the problem of closure: you can’t ultimately SAY who is the source of a thought or if we are “supposed” to think it’s write: indeterminacy frees Woolf from becoming a moral/philosophic dictator
• Art Themes and Metaphors
  • Despiritualized beauty 167-8
    • First, we see Parthenon as “ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy, elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles” (167)
      • We are hoping here that this beauty is natural (through the earth) and reflects some transcendent truth (“spiritual energy”) that keeps us warm and cozy
    • But then we learn the truth: “it is beauty alone that is immortal” so beauty rests on nothing other than itself, not insured by anything else (168)
  • Jinny (Bonamy’s girl-friend while they’re in Paris): she has a box with worthless pebbles in it: “But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life.” (147)
    • Jinny = Virginia
    • This is Woolf’s goal, I would say: the writer must make multiplicity become unity, despite all the problems with doing so.

Quotes

• 76: “Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was repudiated.” (We know Woolf thinks this is superficial; cf her adoration of modern urban life towards end of novel, a glorification of all that pushed Prufrock off the edge…she doesn’t totally hate monotony, you see, but likes cyclical time that results from repetition.)
• 108: “These pinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world.”
• 119: “the Victorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists.” (common critique!)