Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what’s left? In its monthly series Should we reread…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Today, place Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the greatest writers of English literature, a woman who defied the shackles of a Victorian society so quick to stifle singular voices like hers. His imposing and multiple work was not bravado, but an inner necessity.
What hasn’t been said about Virginia Woolf, the woman? His death by suicide appears to many to be the only possible key to understanding his novels, while others explain them by a series of traumas, such as the successive losses of his mother, his half-sister and his father in less than ten years old, when she was still a young woman. Not to mention the incestuous acts committed by his half-brothers…
To reduce Virginia Woolf to her psychological wounds is to reduce her literary approach to dimensions which contradict her great ambitions. Because in addition to touching on different genres, and practicing them with high standards – family heritage, especially from a somewhat tyrannical father, Leslie Stephen, a major intellectual figure in London society -, the author ofA room of one’s own (1929), from Mrs Dalloway (1925), from The walk to the lighthouse (1927) andOrlando (1928) knew how to shake up the romantic rules. To put it bluntly, she was in complete stylistic break with some of her illustrious predecessors, whether called Charles Dickens or Émile Zola, by not only getting as close as possible to her characters, but also by being able to x-ray their souls.
The label “feminist” is also often attached to her name. This is not surprising when we know that she suffered with pain the injustice of seeing her brothers study in the grandes écoles while she was reduced to a limited education in the library ( impressive) of his father. Her voracious curiosity and desire to learn broke some of her chains, thanks to parallel paths (from 1897 to 1901, she took courses in Greek, Latin and history at the prestigious King’s College in London). It was also inspired by the excitement of the Bloomsbury Group, an association of young intellectuals and artists, some of whom were openly homosexual, eager to unravel Victorian England. And in the midst of all this, from the age of 15 until her death, she kept a diary. Which was far from being his only literary exploit.
Thirst for Virginia Woolf
For the great admirers of his work, the cause is understood: it constitutes “a summit in the 20the century”, giving dizziness to those who want to climb it after him. At least this is the opinion of Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, who devoted his doctoral thesis to the abundant correspondence of Virginia Woolf. “In 1988, during my undergraduate studies in literature at UQAM, I took a course solely devoted to her, given by Anne Élaine Cliche: after the first three hours, I knew that I would do a doctorate on Virginia Woolf”, affirms the man who, after a university career, opted for “a free and chosen seclusion” devoted to writing, and more to reading. We were able to hear it in the fall of 2022 at the contemporary art center Le Lieu, in Quebec, as part of a real literary marathon, offering the entire cycle Thirsts (10 novels) by Marie-Claire Blais, six hours a day for 17 consecutive days.
For Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, his love for Marie-Claire Blais and Virginia Woolf is obvious. “I have always been attracted to absolute writers. Woolf is one of the greatest stylists of the English language, the quintessence of the true writer, through her depth, her knowledge of literary fact and her vision. » His admiration, he says regretfully, is not always shared, a deficiency which he explains in part by the abundance of his writings… not all accessible in French. “She has always been a virtuoso of the semicolon. However, a sentence in an original text can contain 30, and only 15 in the French translation. » His practice of literary criticism as well as the art of the essay (more than 700, for a total of 3200 pages) give his work colossal dimensions.
Infusing poetry into novel writing
Imposing, certainly, but also delicate, because the novelist was not guided by the same ambitions as Victor Hugo, Jules Verne or James Joyce. Reading Virginia Woolf is resolutely “having access to the interiority of her characters”, underlines Camille Néron, teacher of literature and communication at the Cégep de Sherbrooke, who has just completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Sherbrooke , a comparative analysis of the worlds and works of Anne Hébert and Virginia Woolf. “I loved reading her diaries,” explains the doctoral student, “because she comments on her literary work – a gold mine for researchers –, like her difficulties during different passages of a book, or her ambitions. , for example making Waves a dramatic poem. She also mentions the tunneling processa way of building tunnels, caverns, behind his characters, as in Mrs. Dalloway, to better reveal their memories, their emotions. In short, she is interested in human relationships, in the way in which human beings communicate… but not necessarily through speech. »
Excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s novels
This thirst for communication was strongly felt at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some saw Virginia Woolf as a symbol, and why not a beacon, in the midst of successive confinements. In a text entitled “I miss Virginia Woolf” published in the literary review Voices and Images, Nelson Charest, professor of poetry at the University of Ottawa, writes that she has developed “a fine tenderness for the anonymous person we encounter, sometimes even without looking, like a prescience of the body (and the soul ) of the shapeless mass which makes up the matter of cities, or of the more particular bodies which cross deserted places alone. In an interview, Nelson Charest, who does not claim to know the whole of his work, admires at the same time “his concern to grasp life, his ethics of empathy and his way of approaching the question of collective consciousness.
In Virginia Woolf, this consciousness resembles, according to him, “an electric current which passes through all individuals” and which mocks social classes, a daring posture in the hierarchical society from which she came. “His characters will dress according to what they have to do,” explains Nelson Charest, “but their inner thoughts will focus on something completely different. No matter our social rank, no matter our wardrobe, we all have almost the same questions, the same questions. » The one who was at the same time essayist, literary critic and editor at Hogarth Press, a house founded and managed with her husband, Leonard Woolf, asked herself a little more than the others, between her loves with other women and her periods melancholy, and was also inhabited by her childhood memories, dense and essential material of her work.
These voluntary and reckless aspects of Virginia Woolf resonate more than ever in current reality, according to Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, who bows to her exceptional capacity for work. “At the end of her life, she maintained six different practices: the diary, the correspondence, the autobiography, the biography [celle de l’artiste peintre et critique Roger Fry] and the writing of his latest novel, Between the acts (1941), my favorite. » Now, the one who has never stopped fighting with her inner demons grants us permission to stumble. “She is the first great novelist of collapse,” says Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, “and she was also a great reader of the collapse of others. That’s it, deep down, Mrs Dalloway : people who collapse. In our world where everyone must produce, and overproduce, Virginia Woolf gives us the right to do so while offering us beautiful insights into loss and mourning. »