The Modernist Novel in its Contemporaneity

Through the writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen, this chapter considers the temporality of the now, the modernist novel in its contemporaneity, to show how the ambient environment of daily life takes shape in, and shapes, the modernist novel

Postmodern and Poststructuralist Approaches to Virginia Woolf

“In or about December 1985, Virginia Woolf criticism changed” (Caughie 1991, 1). Thus begins my book, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), which demonstrates how postmodern and poststructuralist theories can change, and have changed, the way we read Woolf—that is, the kinds of questions that motivate our readings, the objectives that guide our analyses, and the contexts in which we place her works. 1985 was the year Toril Moi published Sexual/Textual Politics and first articulated the opposition between French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist criticism, establishing “feminist postmodernism” as a new methodology that disrupted the cultural consensus among feminist critics of the 1970s. In her introduction, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, Moi interrogates the “theoretical assumptions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics” that made so many American feminist critics resistant to Woolf’s modernist style. Relying on a “realist aesthetic,” these critics, Moi argues, assess Woolf’s writing and politics in terms of whether “the right content [is] represented in the correct realist form” (Moi 1985, 3-4, 7). (The relationship between form and content, as we will see, is one of the first casualties of a poststructuralist critical reading.) In contrast, Moi locates Woolf’s politics “precisely in her textual practice” (16), focusing on the politics of language rather than on the politics expressed by Woolf’s language. Although Moi’s rigid division between the French and the Anglo-Americans may lead to reductive readings, in which all American feminists are represented by Elaine Showalter, Moi was the first to articulate the difference French theory makes for feminist literary criticism. What this change in thinking means for reading Woolf is the subject of this chapter

Passing as Modernism

Passing has once again become a hot topic in contemporary popular culture and a major trope for our critical and professional activity. One thinks of Danzy Senna\u27s Caucasia (1998); Philip Roth\u27s The Human Stain (2000) and the 2003 film version directed by Robert Benton; and in literary and cultural criticism, Gayle Wald\u27s Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000), Kathleen Pfeiffer\u27s Race Passing and American Individualism (2003), and Brooke Kroeger\u27s Passing: When People Can\u27t Be Who They Are (2003), to name only a few examples. In Passing and Pedagogy I explore this concept largely in terms of contemporary culture and criticism. Yet the echo of Johnson\u27s words in Lawrence\u27s disavowal—I don\u27t want to be John Collier—has led me to consider more carefully the emergence of passing, as I have refigured it, in modernism. In that Newberry seminar, I was struck by how the difference between the artistic and the touristic use of other cultures was often lost upon students as it was upon many modernists themselves. For example, in the 1920s, artists, writers, art patrons, anthropologists, and entrepreneurs came together in the southwest to promote a romantic mix of archeology, art, tourism, and politics, as Desley Deacon writes in her biography, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life. While they sought ways to incorporate native art and culture into Western lives without patronizing, appropriating, or destroying it, such a project was necessarily fraught with ambiguity: cultural preservation depended on Western tourism, and spiritual renewal meant going native. In the Newberry seminar, we read works by and about Elsie Clews Parsons and D. H. Lawrence in Taos; Sergei Eisenstein and Langston Hughes in Mexico; Claude McKay and Josephine Baker in France; and Zora Neale Hurston and Melville Herskovitz in the Caribbean. We studied the music of John Alden Carpenter, the photography of Edward Weston, the drawings of Miguel Covarrubias, and the dance of Katherine Dunham. And the more we read, the more important and the more difficult it became to distinguish those who were appropriately self-aware in their representations of others from those who were shamelessly appropriative. I came to see passing and the anxieties it arouses, as well as the border crossings (both literal and imaginative) that at once enable and express it, as the peculiar identification at the heart of modernism—and not just in the sense that the androgyne and the mulatto served as cultural icons of the modernist generation. Rather, I would argue that the fluidity of identity boundaries that we have come to identify with postmodernity—especially a postmodern notion of subjectivity as constructed, discursive, and fluid—has as much or more to do with the historical conditions in which modernist art was produced as with the textual theories of post-structuralism. But first I need to explain the various ways the term passing has been used and how I have refigured that concept

The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism

In this essay, I argue that Woolf’s fantastic novel, Orlando (1928), is more true to the experience of transsexualism than is the allegedly authentic account provided in Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who, as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the first transsexual. Orlando reconfigures notions not just of gender but of time, history, and the very nature of life-writing itself, producing a new model of life writing that I call a transgenre

Audible Identities: Passing and Sound Technologies

At the March 2008 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections held at Stanford University, audio historians played what they claim is the first recording of the human voice. It is a presumably female voice singing Au clair de la lune, though the distorted quality of the 10-second recording renders the words no more decipherable than the singer’s gender to an untutored ear. The recording was made in Paris in April 1860 on a ‘phonautograph’ invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (aka Leon Scott), nearly 20 years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877. Sound waves captured by a horn attached to a diaphragm vibrated a stiff brush that inscribed the pattern of waves on blackened paper. Scott wanted to produce a visual inscription of human speech but had not yet conceptualised sound as something that could be audibly reproduced; that would be Edison’s contribution when he replaced Scott’s paper with a more pliable and durable substance: tin foil and later wax cylinders. The recent recovery of Scott’s early inscription foregrounds the historicity of listening itself. As many scholars have pointed out, audition is organised differently by sound technology so that how we hear, not just what we hear, changes. Hearing becomes historical not just physiological; listening becomes technique. A new form of listening entails a new concept of sound itself. ‘Phonautograph’ means, literally, sound writing itself (which is the subtitle of Scott’s 1878 book); thus the term ignores the very machine that is reproducing the voice. ‘Phonautograph’ suggests that the sound is literally there, textually inscribed on the blackened paper, and thus, technically, is not a re-production. Embedded in Scott’s nomenclature is the germ of the debates that sound technology has aroused in the modernist era over the relative value of—and indeed, the very distinction between—original and copy, live and recorded, authentic and mechanically produced, sincerity and fakery, reproduction and representation. The confusion of those borderlines is graphically presented in the image of the dog with his ear to the horn of the gramophone listening to ‘his master’s voice’ (a trademark first acquired by the London Gramophone Company in 1898 and used by Emile Berliner from 1900), as well as in anecdotes, cartoons, photographs and advertisements from the time in which people mistake the talking machine for a person talking, the mimetic representation for the ‘real thing’. That slippage between the live and the recorded, the original and the copy, is precisely the achievement of sound technology; it is not a mistake but what makes it work. In that slippage lies the key to a new, modernist understanding not just of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but of subjectivity itself. That kind of slippage is one that I have explored elsewhere in terms of ‘passing’

How Do We Keep Desire from Passing with Beauty?

On the day of her party in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway worries about her attraction to beauty in the face of a political and humanitarian crisis: He [Richard] was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? But she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?). (MD 120) This passage resonates with our contemporary situation, evoking as it does the recent fighting in Kosovo, which was in the news when I proposed an MLA paper on the topic of this special issue, as well as recent writings that explicitly or implicitly link beauty with social justice. By way of answering my title question—“How do we keep desire from passing with beauty?”—I want to discuss several works that reiterate Clarissa’s question, especially in relation to the crisis of responsibility that is said to follow in the wake of postmodern theories and cultural criticism

Virginia Woolf\u27s Double Discourse

Written by a feminist (Virginia Woolf), for a bisexual (Vita Sackville-West), about an androgyne (Orlando), the novel Orlando would seem to be the quintessential feminist text. And that, indeed, is what it is in danger of becoming, just as Woolf is in danger of becoming the acclaimed Mother of Us All. In promoting Virginia Woolf\u27s Orlando as a feminist work, feminist critics have picked the right text, but for the wrong reasons. Orlando works as a feminist text not because of what it says about sexual identity but because of what it manages not to say; not because of what it reveals about the relation between the sexes but because of what it does to that relation; not because its protagonist is androgynous but because its discourse is duplicitous. With its eponymous character who changes from a man to a woman halfway through the novel, with its capricious narrator who at times speaks in the character of Orlando\u27s male biographer and at others sounds suspiciously like Orlando\u27s female author, this novel assumes what Jane Gallop calls a double discourse. This double discourse is one that is oscillating and open, one that asserts and then questions, a text that alternately quotes and comments, exercises and critiques. By drawing on the Lacanian readings of Jane Gallop and Shoshana Felman, I want to offer a reading of Orlando that will explore its functioning as a feminist text and that will expose many feminist critics\u27 appropriation of it