This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.
- HTML
- Download PDF
Access options available:
Significant Form in Jacob's Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy
- Kathleen Wall
- Texas Studies in Literature and Language
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2002
- pp. 302-323
- 10.1353/tsl.2002.0018
- Article
-
- View Citation
- Additional Information
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.3 (2002) 302-323
[Access article in PDF]
Significant Form in Jacob's Room:
Ekphrasis and the Elegy
Kathleen Wall
In the first chapter of Jacob's Room, we meet one of the novel's numerous painters, Charles Steele. Faced with the prospect that his subject, Mrs. Flanders, might move, he "struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too pale as usual" (2). While Mr. Steele is certain that the critics will condemn his work, he feels that his hasty dab is just what his canvas needed—"it was just that note which brought the rest together" (3). The effect of Mr. Steele's black dab suggests a vision of the work of art that bears a considerable resemblance to that which Clive Bell articulated in his 1914 book on aesthetics, Art. Attempting to define the characteristics that are shared by those works we consider art, Bell concludes that it is their significant form:
What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Santa Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. (8)
In his chapter on "The Aesthetic Hypothesis," Bell contrasts works like Frith's "Paddington Station," whose detailed representation is meant to convey ideas and information, with nonrepresentational work that conveys the "aesthetic emotion":
Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and [End Page 302] affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. (25)
Woolf's letters, written in response to her friends' reactions to Jacob's Room, raise precisely this issue of her novel's lack of representation. She tells Lytton Strachey that some of the romanticism he accuses her of "comes from the effort of breaking with complete representation. One flies into the air" (II, 569). To David Garnett she confesses that she had doubts about the novel's form, whether it "did keep together as a whole" without the "realism" that we traditionally expect of a novel (II, 571). In the context of R. C. Trevelyan's criticisms of Jacob's Room, she admits that "the effort of breaking with strict representation is very unsettling, and many things were not controlled as they should have been" (II, 588). Mr. Steele's painting and her choice of words in these letters suggest that Jacob's Room constitutes Woolf's attempt to find a "significant form" for her elegy for her brother and for the generation of young men who died in the war.
Numerous critics have commented upon Woolf's unusual and fragmentary treatment of both plot and character in Jacob's Room, viewing these as the novel's most notable formal innovations. But two important aspects of this "significant form" which have not been sufficiently explored are the narrator's uneven authority and inconsistent relationship to the textual world, and the text's saturation with visual images that frequently seem almost ekphrastic, both of which are related to her elegiac purpose. 1 Her narrator's placement within the...
Access options available:
- HTML
- Download PDF