Virginia Woolf

Today I got The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf in the mail. I'd bought it because I thought it contained "Flush," a novella about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel. Any story centered on an animal is of interest to me. (You can actually find a nice copy of the full text free online, I just like physical books). "Flush," however, is not included, though in one of the appendices there are some nice fragments about a dog and monkeys (separate fragments). I also enjoyed a story about a woman named "V." as it was oddly similar to Pynchon's novel/character of the same name in thematizing cyborgs, dispersed agents, and undeath as a unit. The later, more typical stories were less to my liking because they seemed to have a back door, almost Heideggerian reinstatement of the human. Woolf is fantastic at disaggregating the flitting about of the subject in the phenomenological field and capturing each moment as both with and without relation to those adjacent. On one hand, then, this dismantles "the subject"--and while "dismantle" is something of a metaphor here, on the path of modernism/Woolf to postmodernism/Pynchon it is quite literal: Pynchon's V. is made mostly of mechanical parts and her death scene is a literal dismantling. This centerless or defiltered flow is also more likely to admit those object-agents traditionally disqualified as even supporting characters to play furniture or mise-en-scene. However, as Woolf makes clear in her early story "Phyllis and Rosamond," the intent is anthropological: "Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day's work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the door keeper at the Globe [passed his day]....And as such portraits as we have are invariably of the male sex...it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade" (17). The focal point of the phenomenological constellation is a new and better human.

This is not to say that Woolf is only an anthropologist, or even that her contribution to the reformation of literary anthropology is negative, but that her driving continuity is torn between these visions. She is very much at the forefront of modernism. Heidegger's hands, too, know not what the other is doing. Ulysses marks its uncertainty about animals in its mythic-lawmaking structure with sudden reflections on cannibalism. Faulkner's novella "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses is about how a hybrid hunting dog is the only way for humanity to encounter the sublimity of Nature's ferocity. If "modernity" is a term too easily place in certain narratives of the suppression and enclosure of animals, maybe the shorter periodizations of literature can highlight how modernity folds in on itself; how each progressive revolution undercuts itself with regard to its animals and its self as animal. That would be a big project. It can at least be begun with due specificity in texts like "Flush."