|
Literary Review
CLASSICS REVISITED
Reading for pleasure
RAVI VYAS
The Common Reader, Volumes 1 and 2, Virginia Woolf, First published 1925 and 1932 by Hogarth Press.
A good essay must have this permanent quality: it must have its curtain round us but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Virginia Woolf:
The Common Reader
Like Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf described the common reader as “an educational outsider” different from “the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasur
e rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” Above all, he is guided by writing that is artistic and something immediately accessible. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow affection, laughter and argument. At one level, you may find the common reader to be superficial but he is looking for something “that is good in itself….a pleasure that is final”. Besides, he has been rescued from what Dr. Johnson described as “the dogmatism of learning” that makes so much academic writing either incomprehensible or boring or both.
Prolific writer
Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader is spread over two volumes because she was a prolific writer who wrote on just about every aspect of the literary and social heritage of literature. All this apart from her path breaking novels which use the stream of consciousness where interior dialogue like soliloquy, narration of mental processes, both direct and indirect, are woven into the text.
The essays in The Common Reader are also a form of interior dialogue that are written for their own sake, rather than for the sake of the subject. They are unconstrained, independent in their tastes, determined to keep close to the weave and texture of her experiences. They are, therefore, distinguished by marks of intimacy and informality, unhampered by notions of order and regularity; it is the irregular nature of these essays (Dr. Johnson described the essay as “a loose sally of the mind”), which makes them so attractive and readable. Probably because she was master of the art of talking on paper, many have preferred Virginia Woolf, the essayist to Virginia Woolf, the novelist. Not that in reality the two are so readily separable.
When every essay is a classic in itself and the range so wide, where and how does one begin? One could highlight some of the essays in each volume, quote some extracts and then leave it to you to take it from there if you are so inclined. So, here it goes.
Four of the best
There are four essays in Volume 1 that are an absolute must-read.
“Modern Fiction”. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
“The Modern Essay”. “We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
“Montaigne”. “We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.”
“On Not Knowing Greek” and “The Russian Point of View”. These are two different essays but there is a common thread even if it is slim and slender: the problem of translation where we are forced “to judge a whole literature stripped of its style”. So, “humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue”. The problem becomes more acute “when you have changed every word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version of the sense”. The basic substance of Russian literature — in fact, of all imaginative literature — is not reason but emotion which is not expressed by the denotations of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the sounds of the words; in translations, this voice of the story is often lost. All the same, Virginia Woolf does a marvellous job analysing Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and others in this small essay, much better what than academic tomes have done.
Seminal essay
In Volume 2, there are the same riches but the essay that is seminal is “How To Read a Book”.
“The only advice that one can give another is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”. But having said that, she says “do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness …will bring you into the presence of human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite”.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
