Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

This is a short novel published in 1922. It followed two longer novels, "The Voyage Out" and "Night and Day." One must read Woolf very very slowly. She writes in the good company of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Joyce's "Ulysses." You read it slowly but the story moves at the speed of light, changing its style from page to page and changing the setting from paragraph to paragraph. You have to be on your guard. But the rewards are great. It is beautifully written and shows us an author of great depth, and an author whose words reflect thoughts which go back to Plato's dialogue, Phraedrus ,which she mentions in the book, several times, including Jacob''s reading of it. The Phraedrus deals with physical and spiritual love and its relation to the Platonic soul. I offer a bit of trivia. In the dialogue Socrates and his interolocutor, Phaedrus, are sitting down outside Athens in the countryside along the river Ilissus. They sit under a plane tree. Virginia Woolf mentions this tree at least three times in the novel. Perhaps she wishes that she could be sitting along that river under the same tree, in the heat of the Attic day, listening to Socrates and responding to his refutations.

The theme is open ended. Pick your category; youth, sex, the life of a Cambridge student, ancient languages, British small town culture, London, Tristan and Isolde and their love story, prostitution, flowers, flowers, flowers, physical beauty versus Platonic beauty,war and peace, theology,and the Being of life and its appearances as shadows, which is an existential theme. They jump out at you page after page.

Jacob Alan Flanders is our hero along with his mother Betty Flanders. In the spirit of Musil and his "Man without Qualities," I found myself searching, as I read, for Jacob's qualites, that is, his basic character, which changes from his freshman days at Cambridge to later periods; and like Musil, these qualites are evasive. But they do come to fruition at the very end of the novel. The time period is right up to WWI.


We follow, very quickly, Jacob, as a small boy, moving then to his college days, his various trysts with prostitutes or good home spun girls, his academic interests, and his filial duties to his mother. But Jacob's room itself is the central theme of the story. That theme concerns one of the few real moments of being which we humans may capture from the manifold scenes of vagueness and shadows that we are exposed to. The room appears to have no substantial reality to it until, we the readers are firmly placed into it, along with Jacob. The reader is given a description of Jacob sitting in his college room all coszy, reading, with his books strewn about. She captures an authentic sense of being with these two powerful paragraphs:

"Jacob's room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a jar on the mantlepiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red margin-an essay no doubt-'Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?' There were books enough; very few French books; but then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagent enthusiasm...Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One firbre in the wicker arm chair creaks. though no one sits there."

"It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are old, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us-why indeed. For the moment after we know nothing about him."


We caputure this intense reality for just a moment and then we are back to the shadows of Jacob's life, and to the shadows of London town. Wth the following, I thought I was reciting "The Wasteland:"

"Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart-her sinful, tanned heart-for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast."

The novel is written in narrative form. It has its concise and quite lucid descriptions, and then suddenly breaks into 'steams of consciousness' in the Joycean or Dos Passos style. There is no subjective perspective of Jacob. We never seem to get into his mind and how he sees the world. We slowly gain compassion and respect for everything about Jacob. This basic human concern becomes an apotheosis at the end of the novel.

Regards,

Bob Fanelli

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