Shedding Light Into Dark Corners

Shedding Light Into Dark Corners

by Hugo Blumenthal

‘[…] my task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel –it is, before all, to make you see.’Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.

The task of the novelist (according to Joseph Conrad)In 1897, in the ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Joseph Conrad wrote:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential –their one illuminating and convincing quality– the very truth of their existence.1

Written practically at the beginning of Conrad’s career as a writer, such manifesto seems to lay down the principles that would sustain all his work. To begin with, there is the conviction that art should have a function in order to be art, a function that would represent the justification of art’s existence. The work of art is basically conceived within an economy based on utility, in opposition to the apparent gratuitousness of ‘art for art’. The place of art within such economy is reinforced by the designation of its function: ‘to bring to light the truth.’

Despite that such definition of ‘art itself’ is presented as a possibility (‘may be defined’), it seems rather clear that for Conrad any work that would fail to carry on with such function of ‘bringing to light the truth’ would be removed from any consideration of belonging to the sphere of art. A novel of adventures, for example, that could have as its whole aim the entertainment of its readers (something that under some economies could have been considered as having certain degree of utility) couldn’t be considered art according to Conrad’s standards.

Hugo Blumenthal © 2005

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1 Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ed. by Cedric Watts (London: Penguin, 1989), p. xlvii. The italics are mine.

The expression ‘bringing to light the truth’ also leads to Conrad’s idea of truth. For Conrad it is as if truth (‘manifold and one’) were always hidden, in some dark place or dark corner from where the artist needs to take it and bring it to the public. It is as if truth could be found practically ‘under’ any surface, laying in one of its ‘manifold’ aspects but being all the same just one. Conrad’s quest for truth would seem to be a search for an essence and an foundation, a search for origins.

The figures of darkness and light through which Conrad defined the task of art are easily recognised within Western ideologies, from the birth of Christianity to our actual times still so much under the influence of many ideas from the so-called Enlightenment. Within such economy of signs, ‘darkness’ is commonly related to the unknown, to evil, to everything that could be located hierarchically as low, associated with death, with what is primitive, etc. Opposed to ‘darkness’ comes ‘light’, commonly related to knowledge, to everything that is good, hierarchically high, associated with life, civilization, etc.

In literature, these traditional connotations are almost always reproduced (though not always ratified), not matter the ‘movement’ on fashion. Romantics and realists, to name only two of such movements, used figures of darkness and light broadly. Even the so-called ‘modernists’ don’t seem to have been any different. As a matter of fact, as Lyn Pickett points out,

[…] the nineteenth-century construction of Africa, the Orient, and the dark races as the locus of the primitive, non-rational Other of Western culture, and as a metaphor for the mysterious inner territories of the human psyche, has been seen by many recent critics as one of the central components of literary modernism.2

Probably one of the most remarkable utilisation of such figures of darkness and light in the history of English literature is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, two years after The nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. According to Michael Bell, one of the most remarkable things about Heart of Darkness is that is not limited to reproduce the ideology of its time, using Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’ to be explored and bring to the ‘light’ of European civilisation, but that it took ‘the crucial step of internalising the problem’, showing that the ‘darkness’ people used to think as exterior (in this case, in another continent) could lay at the heart of the most enlightened, civilised person.3

Right from the beginning of his story, Marlow concludes that, for what he is concerned, colonialists are ‘going at it blind’, meaning that they seem to be blinded by the same light of civilisation they think would help them to ‘illuminate’ the unknown Africa. But he still concedes some valour to ‘idea at the back of it’4, meaning –as Peter Childs puts


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2 Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions, The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 27.

3 Michael Bell, ‘The metaphysics of Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 23.

4 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. by Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 20.

it– that ‘light is civilization is Western progress is good.’5 Truth, therefore, would seem to be more complicated (or manifold?) than one could have expected from the initial words of Conrad. If by ‘the truth’ Conrad didn’t mean only the essence of it, could still be under such circumstances just one truth?.

But to what point could all this also be the point of other novels around the same period? The aim of the present essay is to show to what extent such figures of light and darkness constitute also an important element in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man (1916) and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), to see to what degree such novels can be denominated art according to Conrad’s manifesto in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’.

Mrs Brown in a dark cornerIn Portrait and The Waves a dark corner could be a physical, concrete place, as the ‘dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the altar [where] a stout old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts.’ (P77)6 A dark corner could also give way (‘round a dark corner’) to a place of fantasy, where ‘whores would be just coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair’ (P109). But more often a ‘dark corner’ is used as a rhetorical figure, to designate, with its double inscription, a ‘location’ out of sight (dark) and out of reach (corner). In The Waves Bernard, for example, talks about the ‘returning from the dark corners in which they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars’ (W72)7, meaning by ‘dark corners’ a ‘place’ where his almost forgotten memories have gone.

Curiously enough, if we also read together Virginia Woolf’s famous essays ‘Mrs Brown and Mr Bennet’ and ‘Modern Fiction’, we have that Mrs Brown seems to have been relegated by Edwardian writers to sit in the dark corner of the carriage of a train. Practically ignored, Mrs Brown (who according to Virginia Woolf represents ‘life itself’, ‘human nature’, and is ‘eternal’, changes ‘only in the surface’) seems then relegated to a corner like ‘a pot broken on the wheel’8; a corner obscured by the stories the Edwardian writers have invented about her.9

With this in mind, if we stretch the possibilities of the figure of the dark corners we could say that there seems to be many other dark places than corners where a writer could go to look for Mrs Brown.


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5 Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 150.

6 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 2000). All page references between parenthesis (following a P for Portrait) are from this edition.

7 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). All page references between parenthesis (following a W for Waves) are from this edition.

8 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mrs. Brown and Mr. Bennet’, in Collected Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 319-337.

9 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Gender of Modernism, A Critical Anthology, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 630.

In the realm of the dark UnconsciousVirginia Woolf wake up one morning feeling being engulfed by an enormous wave, and –in Lyndall Gordon’s words– ‘she glimpsed a fin passing far out amidst the waste of waters, some mighty submerged creature which she must stalk through her own gloom.’10 Could such creature have been also Mrs Brown? The fact is that three years later Virginia Woolf would start writing The Waves, her ‘submarine book’, by which she intended ‘to penetrate depth, vertically’, in her ‘desire for a new solidity and depth’, ‘rather than pursue a ‘liquid’ expansion on the surface’ as supposedly she have being doing until then in her previous works.11 (A novelist, she would explain around the same time, ‘is like a fisherwoman, on the bank of a lake, who lets her rod of reason down into the pool of consciousness.’)12 Through such kind of approach she would try to escape –according to Gillian Beer– from ‘the narrow bounds of social realism which’ she perceived were ‘functioning as a form of censorship.’13 After all, against such ‘narrow bounds of social realism’ is that Virginia Woolf would also write many of her literary criticism. ‘Mrs Brown and Mr Bennet’, for example, would also expose such ‘social realism’ as a form of censorship. On one hand, it seemed a censorship of women, who Virginia Woolf thought have been relegated to a corner as Mrs Brown. Under such view, it couldn’t have been a coincidence that Mrs Brown was a woman, and that the Edwardian writers Woolf used to criticise (represented by Wells, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennet) were men. On the other hand, such ‘social realism’ was perceived as a form of censorship against reality (and not ‘just’ women’s reality), since for Virginia Woolf reality was something much more complex than what have been reproduced until then in fiction.

The problem, however, wasn’t easy to resolve. As Minow-Pinkney has indicated, in her writing of The Waves Virginia Woolf had to face again the dilemma of choosing between a ‘feminist realism’ (that would restate the patriarchal categories it pretends to confront) and ‘an absolute rejection of the symbolic’ (that could precipitate her work into psychosis and ‘so radically divorce itself from the patriarchal system as to lose all possibility of exerting pressure for change on it […]’)14 In response to such dilemma is that Virginia Woolf seems to have ‘chosen’ such language composed by waves, streams and tides, apparently more adequate to explore the ‘dark unconscious’ (against the dominant patriarchal state of a repressive consciousness) and to represent reality (including women’s reality).


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10 Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 203.

11 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, ‘The Waves’, in Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 152.

12 Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, p. 280.

13 Gillian Beer, ‘Introduction’ to Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xiv.

14 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, ‘The Waves’, in Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p.155.

In contrast, Conrad’s language of darkness and light would seem to belong to a masculine economy of truth. After all, sight and blindness had been by then strongly related by Freud to the fear of castration in men. Although, Conrad also showed a persistent fascination with seas and rivers. As for Joyce, let’s remember that Wyndham Lewis once placed him in the ‘realm of the Jellyfish’, that ‘floats in the centre of the subterranean stream of the “dark” Unconscious’; a realm that is –as Bonnie Kime Scott used to argue– Virginia Woolf’s realm.15

Portrait and The Waves contain many references to ‘darkness’ and ‘waves’ in relation to the Unconscious: with ‘words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind’ (W10) and eyes ‘opening from the darkness of desire’ (P253); as ‘to follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past’ (W148). ‘Darkness’ and ‘waves’ are also related to the night, sleep and dreams: so is possible to ‘sink down on the black plumes of sleep’ (W20), and we could have

[…] passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper that they are, stronger than love and more subterranean (W116).

‘Shedding’ light into ‘dark corners’ or bringing things to ‘the surface’, is there an important difference? Apparently not: to plunge under the waves, depth into the sea, is also to plunge into darkness.

Shedding light under the wavesDarkness, waves and the unconscious seem strongly related to a possibility of an experience or important ‘encounter’. Compare, for example, what Virginia Woolf wrote about the fundamental need of establishing a common ground between writer and reader, and Stephen idea of the necessary conditions to gain a transcendental experience. For Virginia Woolf,

[t]he writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognizes, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut […]16

whereas Stephenwanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition


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15 Kelly Anspaugh, ‘Blasting the Bombardier: Another Look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf’, Twentieth Century Literature, 40 (1994), pp. 368-369.

16 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mrs. Brown and Mr. Bennet’, in Collected Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 331.

which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. […] They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. (P67)

Certainly it could be argued that Virginia Woolf only meant ‘dark’ for ‘unconscious’, but what interest us here all the same is the figure of darkness as a fundamental condition to gain certain experience or knowledge. For Virginia Woolf is the condition for reading, for Stephen to gain certain knowledge of himself (as later on he would find out, after having sex with a prostitute, after a ‘[…] dark peace had been established between them’, realizing that ‘[t]he chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself’ (P110)).

In The Waves, as ‘remote provinces […] fetched up out of darkness’ (W112), Bernard ‘perceives’ ‘[m]arriage, death, travel, friendship, […] town and country; children and all that; [as] a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower’ (W191). That means that what exist is as ‘cut out of’ (not only contrasted ‘against’) darkness, meaning darkness then as a sort of void, of death or ‘non-existence’ from where everything comes and returns. What exist (as revealed) appear then like a flower, a flower like the one Stephen perceives after his famous epiphanic encounter with the bird-girl, when

[h]is soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other. (P187)

A ‘flower’, as Jacques Derrida points out, as a metaphor of origin, that ‘lend’ to other metaphors, strongly related to nature, youth and the ‘morning of life’.17 In our case, though, it is also a many-faceted flower, ‘spread in endless succession’, like a ‘manifold’ flower found under the sea and bring to the light, like Conrad’s ‘manifold truth’.

In Portrait and The Waves such encounter with ‘truth’ (or life, or reality) –which according to Peter Childs ‘sits at the core of Modernism’s concerns alongside the struggle to convey through the strained medium of language the heterogeneity of modern life’18– ‘has no conceptual content […] is simply a vision of the external world seen as itself.’19 It doesn’t seem to be a kind of knowledge that could be communicated, an experience that could be translated into more straightforward words.


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17 Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, trans. by F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, 6 (1974), p. 19.

18 Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 148.

19 Susan Dick, ‘I Remembered, I Forgotten: Bernard’s Final Soliloquy in ‘The Waves’’, Modern Language Studies, 13 (1983), pp. 48.

Mrs Woolf and Mr JoyceVirginia Woolf major criticisms to Joyce were the apparent egotism of his characters and his self-consciousness. According to her, ‘we must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.’20 Certainly, ‘[b]ecause Stephen’s narrative method subordinates all other voices to his own, those who represent alternative voices of Ireland become figures that he uses only to punctuate his development.’21 But Stephen, through his epiphanies, experiments a loss of the self, where categories blunder in –according to Joshua Reynolds– ‘[…] a relinquishing of unifying authority in favour of multiplicity.’22

A major difference between Stephen and the characters in The Waves is that Portrait seems, as Wolf’s earlier books, ‘narrated from the perspective of the ordinary world’, where –according to Susan Dick– ‘the glimpses some of the characters have of the reality behind it are intense but fleeting. In The Waves Woolf gives the narration to six speakers who are continually open to this other reality.’23 That means that only through a few experiences (epiphanies) Stephen seems to be able to peer into that ‘other reality’ that apparently the characters in The Waves experiment incessantly.

However, it could also be argued that the anonymous narrator in Portrait assumes many other ‘voices’ as Bernard or the more ‘distant’ and also anonymous narrator in The Waves. In Portrait the reader would find reproduced religious sermons, nationalist diatribes, fragments of conversations, aesthetic theories, etc., as if the narrator is trying to make the reader to experience those discourses as Stephen could have experience them.

On the other hand, compared to Virginia Woolf, for whom –according to Lyn Pickett– it seems that ‘[…] ‘life’ is that sudden epiphanic glimpse into the heart of things that some of characters (usually a female or feminized character [like Bernard]) attain, and which she attempts to articulate in her experiments with fictional form’24, Joyce seems more likely to question such moments of ‘revelation’ through Portrait. Stephen’s epiphanies are shown not only as a way of grasping a certain degree of truth (as knowledge of himself, for example) but as an act of blindness to the reality that circumscribes him. Stephen, more than to plunge into reality, seems to dream of flying over the waves, over the sea, as his mythical father, at whose name, which is also Stephen’s name (Dedalus), ‘[…] he seemed


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20 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mrs. Brown and Mr. Bennet’, The Gender of Modernism, A Critical Anthology, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 640.

21 Jonathan Mulrooney, ‘Stephen Dedalus and the Politics of Confession’, Studies in the Novel, 33 (2001), p. 173.

22 Joshua Jacobs, ‘Joyce’s Epiphanic Mode: Material Language and the Representation of Sexuality in Stephen Hero and Portrait’, Twentieth Century Literature, 46 (2000), p. 25.

23 Susan Dick, ‘Literary realism in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 66.

24 Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions, The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 92.

to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air’ (P183).

Stephen dreams about liberating himself from the discourses that seem to determine and limit the reality of Ireland, apparently without realizing that they are the same constituents of his identity. But the narrator seem determined to take him down, to make him confront a less idealistic ideal reality. For example, from his encounter with the bird girl (P187) to the of the kitchen of his home the next morning (P188); or Stephen’s aesthetic theories contrasted with the cries and dirtiness of the stress by which he and his friend walk (P259-269).

Bernard, on the contrary, acknowledges the function of discourses, stories, etc., through the effect of memory, to the point that outside of Bernard doesn’t seem to be anything else; to the point that he seems also the anonymous narrator of The Waves. Bernard could be perceived as not only telling the story of all the characters but also reaching points where he seems to be the ‘author’ of the descriptions of the movements of the sun in italics in between chapters.

Orpheus’ ParadoxThe well-known myth of Orpheus and Eurydice certainly could be taken as an timeless illustration of Conrad’s concept of the task of the artist. Orpheus, long time before Conrad, have been considered as the mythical representative of the Artist; and his work seems basically defined in relation with his descent into the darkness, in his search for Eurydice, to bring her with him to the light.

In a first instance, though, Eurydice doesn’t seem to coincide with Conrad’s idea of truth. To Orpheus, Eurydice has become part of the darkness (as for Bernard’s darkness represents the void, death), representing what escapes to representation, what doesn’t ‘exists’, but also ‘the origin and cause of representation’25 since it is in her ‘absence’ that she could be desired by Orpheus. In that sense, Conrad’s ‘truth’ is also Eurydice, since it is also ‘the origin or cause of representation’, since it is such search for the truth that originates the work of art.

For Virginia Woolf, however, the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus seems even closer, more adequate. Especially if we remember the original title of what was going to become The Waves. The recurrent image of ‘the moths’ in Woolf’s work, according to Makiko Minow-Pinkney, is after all just another denomination for ‘[…] the ‘uncircumscribed spirit’ that flits briefly into the light of narrative consciousness only to veer away again before it can be definitively grasped.’26 The figure of the moths, after all, seems to point to the paradox of Orpheus. According to Maurice Blanchot, Orpheus


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25 Michael Newman, ‘The Trace of trauma, Blindness, testimony and the gaze in Blanchot and Derrida’, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 158.

26 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, ‘The Waves’, in Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 154.

[…] by turning away to look at Eurydice […] betrays the work and Eurydice and the night. But if he did not turn around to look at Eurydice, he still would be betraying, being disloyal to, the boundless and imprudent force of his impulse, which does not demand Eurydice in her diurnal truth and her everyday charm, but in her nocturnal darkness, in her distance […] which wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible […]27

The paradox of Orpheus is that by looking back he can’t but loose Eurydice by law, but also he could not have not looked back to her without loosing her by betraying his desire of her. What he wants, after all, is not Eurydice present under the daylight, but Eurydice in the darkness of her absence.

In the same way as ‘[…] the singular other cannot fall within the horizon of the day without losing its alterity’28, Virginia Woolf seems to have experimented Orpheus’ paradox, because that ‘reality’ or ‘life’ that she wanted to bring forth from the depths of darkness can’t be but be lost through the very same work of art, through its work as writing and fiction. And the same goes for Conrad’s work of art, because despite his intentions of finding and bringing to light the truth, the result of the search (the work of art) can not be but ‘mere’ representation; therefore, not the truth itself but a fiction, and as fiction the negation of the initial intention.

In Portrait Joyce more than trying to understand ‘life’ or ‘reality’ (and it could be argued that he does, especially Ireland’s reality) seems more concerned with bringing to light the process of formation of the artist. Portrait doesn’t seem to pretend to represent the life of anybody (as Virginia Woolf intended in The Waves) but the life of the artist, the formation of an artist’s conscience. And because Joyce is also an artist (and if he was not before, he would have been through the writing of Portrait), Portrait could certainly be taken, to certain degree, as an autobiographical work. Let’s remember that ‘James Joyce described himself as an autobiographical novelist, believing his life and work to be one and the same, ‘interwoven in the same fabric’’29. That doesn’t mean, however, that the reader should view in Stephen the young Joyce. Certainly, as Richard Ellman has proved in his monumental biography of Joyce,30 there are many common details as points of contact. But also the reader should consider Joyce’s refusal to develop Stephen any further. In Ulysses, for example, Joyce seemed to have thought of Stephen as irremediably ‘wasted’. Therefore, if Joyce really intended to bring to light the formation of the artist, why should he end portraying a ‘wasted’ artist? What could have gone wrong? Could not Joyce have written a ‘passage’ from where he left Stephen at the end of Portrait to the artist he was by then?


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27 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. by George Quasha (New York: Station Hill Press, 1999), pp. 437-438.

28 Michael Newman, ‘The Trace of trauma: Blindness, testimony and the gaze in Blanchot and Derrida’, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 160.

29 Hugh Kenner, ‘The Portrait in Perspective’, in James Joyce: Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Morris Beja ([London]: Macmillan, 1984), p. 124.

30 Richard Ellman, James Joyce (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

There is, however, the possibility that Joyce did not see himself as such Artist. Not yet. There is Stephen Hero to prove, despite his qualities, that he was not yet the artist that he would become. It could have taken him Portrait and Ulysses to reach a different consciousness of himself as artist. In that sense, Portrait could be seen as a foundation, Joyce’s exploration of his dark corners in search of some ground and light, to ‘open’ spaces that would allow him to write Ulysses. After all, to quote once more to Blanchot, ‘[…] one can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.’31 In the same way, paradoxically as it could sound, Joyce only could have written Portrait as he had arrived to that instant towards he can only ‘move through the space opened up by the movement of writing’ Portrait; a movement that would take Joyce more than ten years, from the writing of the first epiphanies, through Stephen Hero, towards the definitive version of Portrait.

Portrait is then a ‘looking back’ for Eurydice, for the origin of the artist and the artwork. But by trying to represent the truly conscience of the artist, the dream-program stated by Stephen, Joyce, as Orpheus, apparently can’t but fail: Stephen should be a ‘failed’ artist. But Joyce also, as for Orpheus, by failing in his attempt to grasp the ungraspable, reaches through his desire of it some insight of an artist’s conscience. An insight that is also brought to light for all the readers to see, ‘represented’ by the work of art itself, by its own movement towards that dark corner rather than for what it illuminates (or precisely because of its failure to illuminate).

Not everything is then lost. As for Orpheus, according to Blanchot, by forgetting the object of his enterprise (to bring Eurydice to the light) is that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf seem to be able to ‘capture’, or at least ‘intimate’, the experience of reality, of life. They reinstate the desire to look for Eurydice, against the law that would seem to guarantee her only through her denial.

Conclusion: Between light and darknessModernism involved a take of distance from what was called Realism, though the objective was almost the same: to render life, to reproduce what is ‘real’; and because the conception, the idea of what is ‘real’ or ‘life’ had changed, the means were supposed to be different. On their search for new forms, that could help them to explore and capture such elusive objects of desire, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf chose the dark regions of literature instead of the well known ‘light’ of the Realist conventions. But by turning to literature, they couldn’t but fail in their search. Literature is in essence a fiction, a negation of any truth and reality than its own. A representation, after all, is destined to never grasp the real object that represents.

It could be argued that Portrait and The Waves have some success in bringing to light not a few things in their exploration of the formation of the individual and the conscience of the artist, the human search for freedom and identity, need for detachment and compromise, dependence on language and of telling stories for the formation of an identity… as the need


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31 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, trans. by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. by George Quasha (New York: Station Hill Press, 1999), pp. 442.

to be ‘open’ to a momentary loss of identity in order to perceive other identities and worlds. Thanks to such things it could be argued that a reader could gain certain insight of ‘life’ or ‘reality’ as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf perceived them.

Although, it is their failure to shed light into such dark corners what could be perceived as their major achievement. Portrait and The Waves, rather than illuminating, eradicating any darkness, stand as testimonies of the existence of the dark corners of the human being; dark corners that we sometimes seem unable to perceive, or that we seem to forget. And by failing, they also encourage us to explore such dark corners. It does not matter if after ‘post-modernisms’ we have become sceptical about the possibilities of bringing anything to light; we still believe that the artist’s task has something to do with searches rather than findings.

Hugo BlumenthalLondon, 2005

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Modernism, 1890-1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1991)

Mulrooney, Jonathan, ‘Stephen Dedalus and the Politics of Confession’, Studies in the Novel, 33 (2001), 160-179

Naipaul, V. S., ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’, in Literary Occasions, ed. by Pankaj Mishra (London: Picador, 2003), pp. 162-180

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The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV: 1931-1935, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982)

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Trotter, David, The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 2004)


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Warren Friedman, Alan, ‘Stephen Dedalus’s non serviam: Patriarchal and Performative Failure in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Joyce Studies Annual, 13 (2002), 64-85

Watts, Cedric, Preface to Conrad (London: Longman, 1982)

Wolfreys, Julian, ‘Heart? of Darkness? Reading in the Dark with J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Conrad’, in Deconstruction • Derrida (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 159-181

Woolf, Virginia, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966)

Woolf, Virginia, The Waves, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

FilmographyPortrait of the Artist as a Young Man, dir. by Joseph Strick ([UK]: Arrow Films, 1979)

‘The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf’, in The Hours (DVD) ([USA]: Paramount Pictures, 2003)


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Documents

Shedding Light Into Dark Corners