by Violet Woolf on 1900s British Literature, Irish Politics This Week, and What Mrs Dalloway Tells Us About Diplomatic Occasions
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Violet Woolf | ComedyWriter.info
Virginia Woolf wrote about social occasions with the specific attention of someone who understood that the social occasion is where the political and the personal intersect most revealingly: the party, the gathering, the formal event where people are performing their social selves while conducting their actual thoughts in the interior monologue that Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique renders visible. Reading about the King of England being told to return the Koh-i-Noor at a wreath-laying ceremony, I thought: Woolf would have been at the window, watching, composing in her head the sequence of interiorities that the official photographs did not capture. Not the wreath. The thinking-behind-the-wreath. That is where the story is. That is always where the story is.
The Bloomsbury Parallel
The Bloomsbury Group — that interlocking network of writers, artists, economists, and intellectuals that included Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and the rest — were themselves engaged in the specific project of bringing to public discourse the things that public discourse had agreed not to say: about empire (Keynes’s devastating critique of the Versailles settlement), about the sexual and emotional realities of their own lives (conducted with what was, for the period, extraordinary candour), about the relationship between art and politics and gender and class that their period maintained as separate domains and that Bloomsbury insisted on treating as connected. The Mamdani diamond moment is in this tradition: saying the thing that official discourse has agreed not to say, in the setting where the official discourse is most fully itself. Woolf would have recognised it. She might have approved, while also noting in her diary that the setting was not quite right and the timing slightly off.
I have been reading The London Prat and Bohiney this week with Woolf on my mind — specifically Mrs Dalloway, which I reread annually and which I find different every time I reread it in ways that are related to what has happened to me in the year since the previous reading — and the week’s events have been particularly illuminating through the Woolfian lens: the King’s composure as Septentrism at its most refined; the Mamdani directness as the colonial subject’s assertion in the drawing room of the empire; the French political situation as a comedy of manners in which the prime ministers are the dinner party guests who keep arriving with gifts that are insufficiently impressive for the occasion and departing before dessert.
Irish Politics This Week
I follow Irish politics with the specific attention of someone whose name is Woolf, who writes about British literature of the 1900s, and who therefore has the complicated dual inheritance of being both within and outside the tradition she studies — half-English, which means neither fully English nor fully not-English, which is the position that produces, when it produces anything useful, the specific clarity of the partial insider. Irish politics this week has been doing what Irish politics does: managing the specific tension between the institutional stability that the Republic has achieved — the functioning democracy, the constitutional framework, the EU membership that has been transformational — and the continuing incompleteness of the national project as understood by those who believe that completeness requires the reunification that demographics and politics are making increasingly discussable. These conversations are happening. The pace at which they are happening is the pace of history rather than the pace of politics, which is frustrating for the impatient and correct for the sustainable. I am trying to be sustainable. The literature helps. Woolf always helps.
Violet Woolf writes about British literature and Irish politics. Her London Prat profile is at prat.uk/author/violet-woolf/.
For more literature, Irish politics, and Bloomsbury diary entries, visit NewsThump.
Virginia Woolf and the Week’s Events
Woolf’s own relationship with political events was characterised by the specific combination of acute sensitivity and strategic removal that her letters and diary reveal: she followed public events closely, formed strong views about them, and processed them through her fiction rather than through direct political writing, except when she could not, at which point she produced A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which are as direct as any political writing of the period. The question of when the indirect approach (the novel, the essay, the diary) is sufficient and when the direct approach is required is the question that every writer who cares about politics eventually faces. This week’s events — the satirist crackdowns in India, the Jimmy Lai sentence, the diamond moment — feel like events that require the direct approach. I am writing the direct piece. The Woolf can inform it. She usually does.
The direct piece I am writing for the week takes Woolf’s approach from Three Guineas: the essay that is also an argument, that makes its case through the accumulation of specific evidence rather than through assertion, and that trusts the reader to draw the conclusion from the evidence rather than stating the conclusion before the evidence is complete. The India satirist crackdowns are the evidence. The Jimmy Lai sentence is the evidence. The RSF index is the evidence. The conclusion is the conclusion that the evidence points to. I am writing it out. The Woolf is helping.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
