The Columbia History of the British Novel

Andrew Ramsay are all destroyed, in different ways, by World War I. Woolf tends to represent the war only in terms of its effects; most famously, in the 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse, she treats the war as absence and decay. During the war years, she trains her narrative attention on an empty house on the Isle of Skye as it is shrouded in darkness and battered by the forces of nature. Similarly, in Jacob's Room the war is figured only by a few vague rumors, until it is abruptly epitomized on the very last page as the listlessness of an empty room, absently strewn with invitations and letters as if its owner might someday return.

The innovation of a book about Jacob's room is that Jacob himself remains elusive, undefined, or else unnaturally reified. What magnetizes the narrative is not so much a protagonist as a vacancy, an inscrutable sign, a monument, which Jacob is long before his death. Insofar as he can be said to become anything, Jacob becomes a Greek statue of a hero, growing ever more 'statuesque, noble and eyeless,' an inert monument to 'the oppression of eternity.' Seen another way, Jacob is nothing, a tin soldier 'driven by an unseizable force,' blindly taking orders from 'men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus.'

Vacillating between the heroically statuesque and the meaningless, between solidity and ephemerality, Jacob signifies the unknowable privacy around which life collects. For the reader, too, he is a cipher; as the narrator explains, 'It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.' Reading people is an arduous, not a casual activity, and the narrator reminds us that most people we encounter are closed books, like strangers in an omnibus: 'Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only -797- read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all-save 'a man with a red moustache. ' Similarly, what we are allowed to see of Jacob is simply his shell, his immediate environment, touched by his past, activities, and tastes: his room. 'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages-oh, here is Jacob's room.'

Jacob's Room is a hopeless book, full of the 'sorrow… brewed by the earth itself.' Its tone is edged with an irony uncharacteristic of Woolf's later works; it mocks the travesty of what passes for communication, intimacy, and knowledge of others, with a submerged anger, a frustrated expectation that subsequently disappears. We come to know very little of Jacob-his outlines, but not his feelings: we learn that he collected butterflies, that he was not his mother's favorite, that he went to Cambridge, that he took a six-day yacht trip with Timmy Durrant in which his Shakespeare was knocked overboard and sank. We know that he is awkward and beautiful, that he disapproves of bowdlerizing Wycherley and has said so in a rejected essay on the Ethics of Indecency. We see him with prostitutes and with Clara, the 'virgin chained to a rock' whom he most honors. We stumble upon Jacob, in what the narrator dryly calls his 'innocence,' wanting an equal relationship, a 'comradeship,' between a man and a woman, 'all spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equal on both, for women, thought Jacob, are just the same as men,' and we witness his disappointment, his 'violent reversion to male society,' when he discovers that one woman's lovely face-Florinda's-is 'horribly brainless.' We see him idealize painters in Paris and fall in love with a married woman amid the dazzling ruins of Greece.

Despite the truth of such bits and pieces of Jacob's life, however, 'there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but… the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history.' The narrator is agonized by the miscarriage of so many efforts aimed at 'reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart,' but is nevertheless firm in the judgment that 'all people are… lonely,' that we never know anything but shadows:

It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow creatures is utterly -798- unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Woolf's conviction that oversimplification, spiced with idealization or contempt, is 'the manner of our seeing' and 'the condition of our love' is reflected also in the fragmented, disjointed style of the narrative in Jacob's Room. The style repeatedly obstructs our desire to shape Jacob's past and his personality into coherence; it parades characters through the foreground who have only the most coincidental and transitory relevance; it scatters our attention in a multitude of directions and interferes with our attempts to eavesdrop on Jacob's conversations or peer voyeuristically into his private rooms. As the narrator wryly comments, 'the march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough.' The narrative balks this readiness to intrude, to appropriate the unknowable, by removing us from the stage of action, depriving us of the context for an occasion, and estranging us from Jacob's perspective. When Jacob quarrels with Bonamy in an inn, we hear only unreliable remnants of the argument from Mrs. Papworth in the scullery, who even has his name wrong; she calls him «Sanders» instead of Flanders.

Mrs. Papworth is here a representation of the reader; her misunderstandings and prejudices caricature our own. Like Mrs. Papworth, we stand outside the «room» of another person; we can catch only phrases-some distorted-which we lightly invest with our own meanings. The narrator parodies our prudishness as well as our ignorance, as when Jacob takes Florinda into his bedroom and shuts the door. The narrative stays behind, fantastically, absurdly fixated on a sealed blue envelope from Jacob's mother that becomes her representative. She is depicted first as broken-hearted, then as outraged at the woman, and finally as revolted by 'the obscene thing' behind the door. The narrator ridicules such prudery in a woman who has had three children, advising her (and through her the high-toned reader) that it would be 'better, perhaps, [to] burst in and face it than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak.'

The tone of Jacob's Room ranges from gloom to parody, from sympathy to ridicule, and the narrative perspective, like the tone, also refuses to remain stable. The focus is continually displaced from the center (Jacob himself) to the periphery, the implication being that Jacob both -799- is and is not to be found in the world around him. The narrator accuses us of looking for a 'perfect globe,' a whole, self-enclosed entity, whereas she sees life as a hum, as air 'tremulous with breathing' and 'elastic with filaments.' Besides, as the narrator remarks when Jacob is nineteen, 'Nobody sees any one as he is… They see a whole-they see all sorts of things-they see themselves… ' At the end of the novel, Woolf leaves the reader not with a knowledge of Jacob but with a sharp realization of having missed him, he who pressed poppies between the pages of his Greek dictionary and is now, his name suggests, in Flanders field.

In Woolf's next novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she again presents her characters as intertwined even with people they pass in the street, but the protagonists themselves are more alive to the shifting boundaries of identity. If Jacob's uniqueness is hard to discern beneath the cast of masculine confidence that makes his «heroism» unexpectedly ordinary, if Jacob's death is oddly continuous with his life as a living statue, Mrs. Dalloway takes as its touchstone not death, but life: Clarissa's party and Septimus's suicide are converging ways of expressing and defending a precious and vital balance between connection and isolation. Jacob's shape is overdetermined by his beauty, his education, his class, and his gender; only at brief moments do suggestions of originality assert themselves, such as in his outrage against censorship or his desire for an equal partnership between the sexes. Clarissa is also to some extent shaped by her class and sex, but Woolf draws our attention to the part of her sensibility that eludes labels, that revels in the abundant sensuality of the moment, enriched by traces of the past.

Mrs. Dalloway at first appears, like Jacob's Room, to be magnetized by a single figure-Clarissa Dalloway. Partway through the novel, however, it becomes apparent that Clarissa has a male double, Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran-now a clerk-thirty years younger than she. This unlikely counterpart to an aging society woman is both opposite and identical to her: Septimus, too, sharply registers the intensity of life, which to him, after the shock of combat and the death of his commanding officer, is both terrifying and sublime. Even in his madness he recoils against the horror of killing ('men must not cut down trees'), and lashes out against the lie of civilized life ('the world itself is without meaning'). Septimus, in agonized skepticism, sees himself as a scapegoat, sacrificed for a social construct devoid of truth, along with the 'many millions of young men called Smith' that London has swal-800- lowed before him, but he is also a visionary, muttering to himself, 'Communication is health; communication is happiness.' How meaningful communication-as opposed to propaganda-operates is the informing question of this book.

For unlike Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway does not despair of communication; it simply redefines it as indirect,