The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (review)

The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. Ann Banfield. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 433. $49.95.

The Phantom Table is a magisterial book. Its range of reference is astounding, its engagement with the subject of Cambridge/Bloomsbury epistemology precise and profound. By focusing on the connections among Bertrand Russell's epistemology, Roger Fry's aesthetics, and Virginia Woolf's writing, Ann Banfield has given us a new way to see the depth of cross-fertilization at work among these writers as well as the possibility that Russellian realism has more to do with Woolf than had previously been supposed. In particular, she offers us a view of Woolf herself as consistently concerned with the analysis of sense data and the questions of epistemology predominant in British analytic philosophy of the early years of the twentieth century, and an understanding of Woolf's art as an effort to transform this epistemology into aesthetics.

"Think of the kitchen table when you're not there": so says Andrew describing Mr. Ramsay's work to Lily in Woolf's To The Lighthouse. ¹ Critics have generally ascribed this kind of philosophical concern primarily to Mr. Ramsay, the thinker so stuck in his intellectual rut that he can hardly see the human events going on in the house around him. His is not a perspicacious view of "reality"; we search elsewhere for a guide to Woolf's own philosophical tenets. Yet Banfield claims we ought not dismiss this concern with the kitchen table so quickly in Woolf's work. "The table is interposed between Woolf's woman-artist and the philosopher, placing the problem of knowledge at the center of Woolf's art" (49). Concern with the table haunts Lily throughout the novel, even as it appears as a point of reference elsewhere in Woolf's writing. It becomes a source of Lily's art. As Banfield will claim, concern both with sense data and the extension of knowledge beyond what our own senses tell us rests at the core of Woolf's fiction.

It is this concern that brings Woolf's writing into contact with Russell's philosophical realism, which seeks to account for the gap between what we can observe through direct experience and what we can know. "His goal is a knowledge that starts out from observation but radically differs from it . . . the renunciation of direct perception as the model of all knowledge. Its substitute is knowledge by description" (48-9). Thus the positioning of the unseen table between the philosopher (Mr. Ramsay) and the artist (Lily) demonstrates the path that Woolf will follow from epistemology to aesthetics via description. So too, the philosophical problem of the unseen table raises a question that Woolf will later pose, through Bernard, in The Waves: how describe "the world seen without a self." ² For Banfield the word "seen" crucially emphasizes the perception of reality as an aesthetic problem outside personal psychology. If Woolf presents us with a flurry of sense-data or a shower of atoms seen through the windows of several subjective perspectives, the result is a reality composed of many parts, drawn together by the postimpressionist aesthetic process that Fry will call "framing" (329).

Thus Banfield wants to describe the convergence of Russellian realism and Fry's postimpressionism in Woolf. Russell describes a dualism in reality, which necessitates a correlation between sensed objects and the mathematical or physical logic of their relation. For the Cambridge philosopher, sense data are described as "patches of colour, sounds, tastes, smells, etc." while matter is colorless (258). As Banfield claims, "the relation between colorful sense-data and colorless matter establishes the philosophical framework for an aesthetic, one worked out paradigmatically for the visual arts in the theories of Fry and Clive Bell, and for literature by . . . Woolf herself" (260). Thus the relation between "granite and rainbow" becomes the site of the intersection...