Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (review)

In Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Pamela Caughie wrought a fascinating collection of essays by bringing together a superb cast of Woolf scholars. Variously examining the impact of lens and sound technologies on Woolf’s narrative strategies, analyzing her own photograph albums, tracing her changing response to motoring, and more generally, locating her writings in a time of proliferating technologies of mechanical reproduction, and contrasting her response to it with that of Walter Benjamin, the essays provide an excellent survey of the effects of contemporary technologies on the creative imagination.

Attesting to an apparent need to combine outsiderness with participation in the system, Woolf’s vexed relation to the market is examined from several angles. Discussing Woolf’s appearances in and contributions to British Vogue, Jane Garrity convincingly traces Woolf’s current iconic status back to the magazine’s showcasing, in the 1920s, of Virginia Woolf as a beautiful Englishwoman and its construction of her as a highbrow literary celebrity. Woolf’s resisting complicity in her own commodification, Leslie Hankins and Sonita Sarker argue, is to be assessed in the light of women’s access to public dissemination. And the maternal language of Woolf’s photograph albums, Maggie Humm’s reading implies, ought to be read as shaped by the same forces.

In the probing of the impact of broadcasting and gramophones, of Hubble’s telescope, of the Woolfs’ acquisition of an Algraphone, a motor car or a Zeiss camera, not every critic is as successful in avoiding a certain determinism. Yet the emphasis is on aural and visual experiences distinctive to the 1920s, and on how the new technologies of sound and vision transform perception itself, as well as the modes of representation. Analyzing the new aural sensibility coincident with the advent of the gramophone and the wireless, Melba Cuddy-Keane makes a strong case for the need of the narratological term “auscultation” for the reception of sound to parallel “focalization” for the reception of sight. Arguing for a three-dimensional view of cultural history, she shows Woolf’s fiction to handle sound in ways that convey a novel sense of hearing and anticipate the radiophonic and electroacoustic art of Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage. An essay by Bonnie Kime Scott completes Cuddy-Heane’s history of sound by providing an account of the gramophone in the early twentieth-century, and expounding its subversive effects in Between the Acts—an analysis that is, in its turn, complemented by Michael Tratner’s examination of Woolf’s exploitation of filmic techniques in the context of her pacifist politics. In contrast, both Holly Henry and Makiko Minow-Pinkney focus more narrowly on narrative strategies as they coincide with emerging technologies of sight: the former, by examining the role of the telescope in giving form to Woolf’s narrative perspectives and political views; the latter, by analyzing how the speed of motoring contrasts with the leisured pace of the flâneur and requires a different aesthetic mode.

An invitation to reassess the relation between modernist works and their material conditions of production to politics and mass culture, the volume also invites thinking about our own age of mechanical reproduction. It is, indeed, significant that the recent trend towards the study of Woolf in relation to technology and science coincides with an increased awareness and concern about the changes wrought by our electronic age, as it is significant, I think, that we turn to Woolf not only for foil but also for precedent. Mark Hussey’s closing contribution, contrasting Woolf’s theory of embodied reading with hypertext technologies, articulates what seems to be “the condition of possibility” of this research project. In the light of Hussey’s conclusion that much gets lost when digitalizing Woolf, investigations of her engagements with technology emerge as attempts at warding off the specters raised by contemporary technologies, a guarantee against the threats of mechanical reproduction.