I picked up and read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando over the weekend. Generally not my cup of tea–I could do without the coy inside jokes and the motif of “barbarian” Africa, which begins on p. 1 and runs throughout. However, I found myself developing respect for two aspects of this highly unusual novel.

First, it is impressive how the narration evolves to match the historical period described on each page. The language shifts from courtly Elizabethan prose to the rapid-fire, cinematic feel of a movie. James Joyce does the same thing even more radically in Episode 14 of Ulysses. Perhaps Woolf’s subtler experiment is more satisfactory; but in neither book is this technique a gimmick. I think modernism arises when artists, in any medium, realize that you cannot simply describe the world. You always do so in a style; and styles vary. The problem is: Why should you pick one style instead of another? Why, therefore, should you make art at all? One answer is abstraction, which means dropping the pretense of objectivity. Woolf and Joyce try something different; they make the change of style itself the subject of their story.

Second, I came to see that Woolf respects her protagonist. Orlando is generally identified with Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a relationship. For quite a few pages, I thought the portrait of Sackville-West was patronizing. Orlando has great legs and lots of money. He (later she) yearns to be a writer, but writes nothing of value. I cannot imagine that Sackville-West would want to be so portrayed. But it turns out that Orlando matures as the novel progresses, and the story of his/her development is moving because it reaches a conclusion in full, self-conscious, capable and creative adulthood.

Years ago, I heard Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler speak at the Library of Congress. Their assignment was to read and reflect on their ten favorite poems. Vendler read some not-very-famous work by poets she knew, as well as some important poems that mattered to her for biographical reasons. Bloom then said something like this (in his stentorian voice, with his eyelids batting madly): “I like Helen, and I admire her criticism, but those were not the ten greatest poems in the English language. Here are the ten greatest poems in the English language.” He proceeded to recite ten lyric poems about the self in a hostile world. I don’t remember the list, but I recall that it began with Tom O’Bedlam’s song:

From the hagg and hungrie goblin

That into raggs would rend ye,

And the spirit that stands by the naked man

In the Book of Moones – defend ye!

[….]

I simply don’t read enough poetry to have a worthwhile top-ten list of my own, but I could cite some English lyric verse that has struck me as particularly magnificent over the years: Thomas Wyatt, “They Flee from Me that Sometime Did Me Seek” (chosen, I admit, because I am moved to hear a voice from so long ago); Shakespeare, the song from The Tempest (“Full fathom five, &c,” because it is so abstract that it exemplifies lyric); Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”; Arnold, “Dover Beach”; Browning, “The Bishop Orders his Tomb” or another of his great dramatic monologues; Yeats, “Among School-Children”; Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (on which Vendler is a superb guide). These authors are all dead white Englishmen, which simply reflects the limits of my reading.

I’m going to try a little light blogging again, although I’m still very emotionally preoccupied. Throughout this difficult period, I have been trying to use novels as a distraction–reading works by Alan Furst, Patrick O’Brien, and Ward Just that could be classified as “genre fiction.” It struck me yesterday that that disparaging phrase is a solecism. Should we call Hamlet “genre fiction” because tragedy is a “genre”?

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Traditionally, artists work within a style, but they don’t think of themselves that way. They either equate their style with art itself (believing that they depict nature as it always has been depicted), or else they offer abstract and universal reasons for their stylistic choices. For example, classical styles were often defended on the ground that the ancient Greeks had discovered universal principles of beauty and representation.

Then, at a certain point, it became obvious that all art depicts the world through a style, that styles differ from time to time and place to place, and there is no independent aesthetic standard that makes one better than all the others.

Since then, to make a picture has been an entirely different matter. You must start by picking a style. The most obvious move is to use someone else’s style, which is why revivalism became the major mode in the early nineteenth century, the age of Gothic revival and the troubadour style; of Greek revival; and of orientalism. There have been various efforts to avoid style altogether–abstraction, minimalism, surrealism–but they have all quickly become styles of their own.

I have been convinced of this Hegelian story for more than twenty years, and I have seen a lot of images in that time. I’m always looking for the moment when full stylistic self-consciousness begins. As of our last trip to Paris, I’m pushing the onset back a few decades. The Musée Jacquemart-André owns a fresco that Tiepolo painted in the mid-1750s to depict the arrival of King Henri III (of France) at the Villa Contarini, near Venice, in 1574. (Click for a large image). Tiepolo chose to paint this image in the style of Veronese. He didn’t copy an actual Veronese–something that might have been done centuries before. Instead, he painted the scene as Veronese would have seen and shown it. I don’t think that choice would have occurred to any artist before 1750, and once it happened, art was on its way to modernism.