by Violet Woolf’s Diary: On 1900s Literature, the Irish Question, and the Long British Tradition of Saying Nothing Loudly
By Violet Woolf | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
I have been rereading Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa prepares a party while London proceeds outside. She does not, at any point, describe the party as “a tremendous and transformative social occasion.” She thinks: the flowers. The silver. The people coming. This is British understatement operating at the level of art: the weight of a life contained in lists.
Woolf and the Grammar of Not Quite Saying It
Virginia Woolf is not, technically, funny. And yet — if you read her with the right frequency — she is constantly nearly funny. There is a dryness to her precision that is adjacent to comedy. When she describes a character as someone “for whom the world had been arranged somewhat differently than it had been for others,” she is making a joke. She just makes it very quietly, and trusts you to hear it.
This is the root of the British literary tradition that produces satire: the trust that understatement will be received. Swift used it for demolition. Austen used it for surgery. Woolf used it for portraiture. All three are saying: I know you know what I mean, and my not saying it loudly is how I show you I know that you know.
On Irish Politics This Week
Ireland continues to be Ireland, which is to say: magnificently itself, complicated, and covered with a literary tradition that makes the British look relatively forthcoming. Irish understatement goes further than British understatement — the Irish describe catastrophe as “a situation” and call tragedy “a pity” and the weight behind these phrases is tectonic. The Guardian’s Ireland coverage this week involved several things I would describe as Situations. The Irish have been describing Situations for eight hundred years. They are better at it than anyone.
From the London Prat this week: the history of British satire — essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a culture processes its worst impulses by making them funny. From Bohiney: the internet held together with duct tape — which is itself an understated description of something genuinely alarming. Woolf would have written it differently. She would have given us the exact texture of the duct tape, the weight of the server room, the particular light through the data centre windows. It would have been 400 pages long and still an understatement.
I had tea and read for the rest of the evening. Called it “a productive day.” Meant it sincerely for once. Even Violet needs a break from irony.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Literary adjacency also at The Daily Mash
