Where this starts is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929).
When it starts is September 2018, the month I copied this paragraph out — because I knew there was something I could learn from it, but I didn’t know what that was.
The fact is that neither Mr [John] Galsworthy nor Mr [Rudyard] Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Goodness, how objectionable Virginia Woolf can seem.
I’m sure there are Galsworthy and Kipling scholars who would go into critical battle to prove he or he had feminine elements. (Some might shrug and say, Fair dinkum.)
Other critics would wonder what kind of essentialist woman-spark Woolf is talking about. Is that a spark that can be generated by the flint or friction of male curiosity into female being? (Meaning Galsworthy should have put in more effort.) Or is it a female soul that only a few lucky men are born with? (Meaning Kipling was doomed from birth to wear male blinkers.)
I am less concerned with this spark than with the fascinating idea of suggestive power.
Woolf returns to the subject a bit later on —
It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground — dead; but when one takes a sentence of [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.
I am going to suggest that what much contemporary writing lacks is suggestiveness.
(I mean fictional and non-fictional writing, and I mean my own as much as anyone else’s.)
When a book does come along, like Claire-Louise Bennett’s POND (2015), that is full of Woolf’s suggestiveness, readers and writers adopt and love and imitate it.
For future writing, I find this statement of Martin Heidegger’s suggestive.
Philosophy is the imageless saying “of” be-ing itself. This saying is not statements made “about” be-ing, rather be-ing sways as this saying. Philosophy is such a saying or it is nothing at all. The rest is complicated erudition which has mistaken its object and is therefore neither “useful” and productive for science, nor does it ever touch upon a decision in philosophy.
Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, pg 50.
I’ll explain by illustration.
What follows is ‘a statement made “about” be-ing’. This is a description of consciousness — from a very good, loveable novel, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (pg 2) :
Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and park like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and reshuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.
By contrast, in this next passage from POND, ‘be-ing sways as this saying’. Here is an enactment of consciousness, consciousness in language. Rather than flatly say ‘There is no chronology inside my head’, Claire-Louise Bennett does and dances that atemporality:
I believe that’s where I lost my heart.
Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded with and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal. Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening. and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and no one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out there any one. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.
Claire-Louise Bennett, POND, pg 140-142
The difference between the two passages is, I think, similar to that pointed out by Francis Bacon in one of his interviews with David Sylvester:
“..an illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.”
Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1985, pg 56.
(Quoted in Nothing if not Critical, Robert Hughes, pg 317.)
This is a variation on T.S.Eliot’s words, ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. (In the essay ‘Dante’, 1929)
Here is an illustrational form —
Here is a non-illustrational form —
And this (because it’s not just about modernism) —
In the next couple of entries, I’m going to see what I can say about this.
It’s far from simple.