by Violet Woolf Channels the Modernist Tradition Through the Lens of a Labour Leadership Crisis
Mrs Dalloway Would Have Something To Say About All This
She would buy the flowers herself. This is what we know about Clarissa Dalloway at the opening of the novel: she chooses agency. She goes into the morning and she acts. She does not outsource the flowers and she does not wait for the flowers to arrive and she does not commission a committee to investigate the optimal approach to obtaining the flowers. She goes. She gets them. This is, in the literature of the early twentieth century, a revolutionary act disguised as an ordinary morning.
Keir Starmer did not buy the flowers. He commissioned a review of the flowers. He consulted widely on the florist selection. He published a strategy document on the floral procurement timeline and then, when the flowers still had not arrived, he resigned. This is the difference between the modernist tradition and the contemporary political class, and I think about it more than is probably useful.
I am Violet Woolf. I write for The London Prat. I am interested in 1900s British literature, current events, and Irish politics, which is a combination that keeps me in a permanent state of productive agitation. Virginia Woolf is not my ancestor in fact — the name is a writing name, a hat I put on when I want to think in a particular mode — but she is my ancestor in method, and the method is to look at the surface of things until the surface opens and shows you what is underneath.
What the Surface Reveals
The surface of this week says: a Prime Minister resigned, a leadership contest began, various senior politicians expressed their commitment to party unity while positioning for personal advantage. Underneath the surface: a generation of political professionals who were trained in the techniques of power without the purposes of power, and who have spent their careers doing the techniques correctly while the purposes quietly evacuated the building.
The seven reasons Labour keeps failing, as listed by The London Prat, are technical diagnoses of a spiritual problem. The technique has failed because the spirit left first. Woolf understood this about the post-war moment she wrote in: the forms survived the war but the conviction that had produced the forms did not. You got the drawing rooms without the certainty that had made drawing rooms meaningful. Labour has the policy documents without the conviction that gives policy documents their urgency.
The Irish Parallel
Irish politics in this same period — the early twentieth century, which is where my reading keeps returning — was full of people who wanted something so badly they were willing to die for it, which is an intensity of wanting that produced both extraordinary courage and terrible violence and ultimately a state that is imperfect in very specific ways related to that intensity. The lesson is not that Labour should want things with the intensity of 1916. The lesson is that wanting things is not the problem. The specific things wanted and the methods of wanting them are where the moral complexity lives.
Burnham wants to be Prime Minister with the intensity of someone who has been preparing for this for a long time. He measured things and was vindicated. He has the northern credential and the mayoral record and the genuine conviction on certain issues. Whether the conviction extends to the full scale of what the moment requires is the literary question about him — what does the character actually want when the wanting is tested?
On Belonging and the Citizenship Test
Woolf was fascinated by the question of who belongs and under what conditions. Her essay “A Room of One’s Own” is, at its core, an argument about the conditions under which genuine membership in intellectual life is possible — not mere presence but full participation, the ability not just to be in the room but to shape what happens in it. The British citizenship test debate this week touches the same question and gets it entirely wrong.
Membership is not demonstrated by answering questions about the Magna Carta. Membership is demonstrated by being present in the life of the place — by caring about its weather, its queues, its peculiar national embarrassments, by having a stake in its future. The test measures access. It does not measure belonging. Woolf would have found the distinction obvious and the confusion about it predictable.
Bohiney Magazine covered the citizenship debate this week with its characteristic mix of satire and genuine insight, noting that the test is a document about anxiety rather than a document about belonging. Anxious nations ask questions. Confident nations make people feel welcome. Britain is currently doing the former while aspiring to the latter.
The Labour Unity as Stream of Consciousness
If Woolf had written the Labour unity press releases she would have given each signatory their own internal monologue: And she would support Burnham she thought while thinking that she would support him publicly because that is what unity required but privately she thought he was not quite what she had imagined when she had imagined the party finally getting it right and the getting it right that she imagined was more something like what she had been — but no, unity, unity was the thing, the letter needed signing, the morning was already very long.
This is, I suspect, not far from the actual experience. Stream of consciousness as a technique is interesting precisely because it reveals the gap between the performed self and the thinking self. British politics is almost entirely performed self. The gaps are the interesting bits.
According to the British Library’s modernism archive, the post-war literature of the 1920s was preoccupied with the question of how to go on when the structures you thought were permanent had collapsed. We are in a comparable moment. The literature that will come from it will be interesting. The politics, in the short term, will be complicated. I am taking notes on both.
Finishing the Sentence
Woolf left many sentences unfinished, or rather she finished them in ways that resisted the conventional satisfactions of completion. This is where the modernist tradition remains useful: it teaches you to be suspicious of the clean ending, the resolved chord, the leadership contest that produces exactly the leader needed at exactly the right moment. Real things are more complicated than their endings suggest. The plot continues after the chapter closes.
Britain continues. Labour continues, in its complicated way. Literature continues, which is the most reliable thing I can report.
More at prat.uk/keir-starmer-resigns/ and all my literary-political writing at my page at The London Prat. Extra reading from The Satirist.
For the comedy relief this crisis demands: NewsThump — covering the absurdity so the rest of us don’t have to.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
