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Humdrum Cacophonies: Silence and Noise in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

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Oziewicz T.

Anglica Wratislaviensia

2013

issue 51

47 - 57

In Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out, one of the protagonists expresses his wish to write a novel about “Silence” or, as he explains, “the things people don’t say.” If this is what silence meant to Woolf — the unvoiced thoughts and words — then silence is one of the basic components of her prose, if not her topic proper. I suggest that all of Woolf’s novels are, to an extent, novels about silence in this specific sense of the word. In a more literal sense, that is, on the level of imagery, silence and sound also carry a deeper significance. The Years, predominantly hushed and mild, becomes, at times, very loud. As the novel proceeds, the noise becomes more pronounced: it rises and subsides only to intensify again, sometimes reaching the level where it dominates episodes. Due to its subtlety and complexity, the aural dimension of the novel deserves readers’ attention in its own right. My examination of the cadence of noise and silence in The Years is congruent with David Bradshaw’s suggestion that there might be a complementary narrative encoded within the novel; in Bradshaw’s analysis, the pattern of insignificant items in white-and-blue recurs throughout The Years, implying Woolf’s silent engagement in the plight of the Jews, attacked in the late 1930s from increasingly more directions. The aural dimension of The Years conveys a similar message. The noise — which rises as the novel proceeds — accompanies the character who, as the story draws to a close, voices out loud the anti-Semitic sentiments. My point is that, far from it being a coincidence, the din that dominates certain episodes foreshadows this anti-Semitic outburst. Thus The Years, albeit in an oblique way, addresses the issue of British anti-Semitism: Woolf must have been more disturbed by the proliferation of anti-Semitic rhetoric than she is sometimes thought to have been.

On the Greek-Talking Birds: Virginia Woolf and the Greek-Talking Men

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Oziewicz T.

Anglica Wratislaviensia

2012

issue 50

89-99

That the attitude towards Greece in England in the first decades of the 20th century was as gendered as classical education had been for centuries, and that the latter is the reason for the former, can be glimpsed when one reads, side by side, two hauntingly similar yet disconcertingly different essays on Greece: Virginia Woolf’s “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) and W.H. Auden’s “The Greeks and Us” (1948). Both authors reflect upon spiritual and intellectual indebtedness to Greece and both reveal a deep admiration for the Greek heritage. Yet, they do so from two different angles. Whereas Auden writes about Greece from the perspective of an insider who belongs there, confidently and unquestionably, Woolf does so as an outsider. To Auden, the Greeks and “us” share the same emotional and intellectual continuum; to Woolf, the distance between them and us is unbreachable. In her withdrawn admiration she refrains even from admitting that she is quite fl uent in ancient Greek, suggesting –– with the very title –– the contrary. These opposite perspectives on equally beloved tradition are all the more striking because Woolf, as much as Auden, was a connoisseur of Greek literature. Exploring this issue, it is necessary to look at the significance of the classics in the traditional model of education with its gender division, at English literary tradition, and at psychological and artistic reactions to the pressure exerted by the patriarchal discourse, such as the “Greek-talking birds” from Woolf’s hallucinations. As I demonstrate in this article, the Greek-talking birds are one key trope in Woolf’s fiction that suggest her obsession with the language and her fear of gender exclusion, but perhaps more than anything they evoke the mythical figure of Tiresias, the shadowy model for all sex-shifters.

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2 Anglica Wratislaviensia

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Humdrum Cacophonies: Silence and Noise in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

On the Greek-Talking Birds: Virginia Woolf and the Greek-Talking Men