Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction to Contradictory Woolf
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- “But… I had said ‘but’ too of ten.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
- “The Play's The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf's Work in the Late 1930's and Her Vision of Prehistory
- Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- “But somebody you wouldn't forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art
- Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf's Writings on Art
- “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography
- “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas
- Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque
- Woolf's Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf
- “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One's Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an Calculated Cross-Dressing
- Lacanian Orlando
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush
- From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf's Flush
- Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of : Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf's Economic Writing
- “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf's Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the Fourth Dimension
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition
- “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating
- Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “Patron au Dedans”
- Who's Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge's Translation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films “projected into the shape of Orlando”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf's Rhetoric of Genres
- Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf : “A Chapter on the Future”
- DUNCAN GRANT
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction to Contradictory Woolf
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- “But… I had said ‘but’ too of ten.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf -wise
- “The Play's The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf's Work in the Late 1930's and Her Vision of Prehistory
- Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood
- “But somebody you wouldn't forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art
- Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf's Writings on Art
- “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography
- “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas
- Woolf's Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque
- Woolf's Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf
- “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of One's Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an Calculated Cross-Dressing
- Lacanian Orlando
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush
- From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf's Flush
- Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of : Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf's Economic Writing
- “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf's Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the Fourth Dimension
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition
- “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating
- Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “Patron au Dedans”
- Who's Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge's Translation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films “projected into the shape of Orlando”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf's Rhetoric of Genres
- Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf : “A Chapter on the Future”
- DUNCAN GRANT
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
Summary
There is what might be called a Proustian moment in Chapter 7 of Jacob's Room (1922), but it is not really a Proustian moment, more a travesty of one. An image on which the famous madeleine episode depends is dismissed as a faddish distraction for dinner parties. Here is Proust:
And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character and form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Swann's Way 51)
In describing how the whole of the Combray of the narrator's childhood emerges from a cup of tea, Proust deploys a conceit whose success depends on a flirtation with the bathetic and grotesque. Disproportion and the possibility of comic deflation are never far away when Proust is in this mood, especially in metaphors of transformation and creation. After writing his first prose poem about the steeples of Martinville the young Marcel clucks like a hen who has laid an egg, the work as a whole is compared to a “boeufen daube” and to a dress as well as to a cathedral, and time, in the final sentence of Le Temps Retrouvé, has us teetering on the stilts of the years. Stiltedness is courted frequently, deliberately, in both the overarticulated syntax and overelaborated imagery of Proust's metaphorical flights.
Woolf's invocation of the paper flowers is sardonic, even a little condescending, the elaborated lyricism of Proust undone by briskness:
About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it was the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was found of excellent service.
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- Contradictory Woolf , pp. 259 - 264Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012