Woolf: The Multiplicity of Self and Art

ELT 36:4 1993 accurate. James has not allowed this to deter his appreciation of Lawrence's genuine accomplishments. Although James disputes many of Lawrence's claims, his balanced assessment ultimately validates his admiration for Lawrence, who emerges from the Golden Warrior with a great deal of credit, not in spite of his difficulties but because of them. James's Lawrence combines fixity of purpose with self-doubt, sensitivity toward others with an annoying pleasure in misleading them, and truly extraordinary talents with confused responses to the legend that he helped create. However, as James's book makes clear, this in no way diminishes Lawrence's successful coordination of the Arab revolt, his literary efforts, or his humanity . The ambiguities of Lawrence's troubled nature make his actual achievements all the more remarkable. Fred D. Crawford Lansing, Michigan Woolf: The Multiplicity of Self and Art Thomas C. Caramagno. The Flight of the Mind Virginia Woolf s AH and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xi + 362 pp $30.00 WOOLF CRITICISM has been plagued by reductionist approaches to her life and art. We have been told that because Woolf evidenced affective disorders, as do incest victims and others, then she must have been the victim of incest. We have been told that because Virginia railed against Leonard Woolf in her 1915 breakdown, he was and continued to be an oppressor (never mind that she railed against her sister in her 1904 breakdown). We have been told that because Woolf was a brilliant and prolific writer, her "madness" was an invention of persons determined to belittle her achievement. We have been told that her breakdowns were rational responses to an oppressive patriarchy. We have been told that Woolf s physical symptoms (headaches, influenza, etc.) were an expression of guilt, grief, and unresolved conflict. And we have been told that her fiction likewise was an expression of these feelings. Countering such pronouncements with logic or biographical evidence has had little impact. Thomas Caramagno's brilliant study offers a real possibility for shifting the balance toward objective analysis. He grounds his literary analysis upon recent discoveries of neuroscience. Neurological research has disclosed the workings of the two hemispheres of the brain—the left 498 BOOK REVIEWS with its rational/verbal ways of addressing and the right with its emotionaVvisual ways of experiencing the world. This research establishes that we all are of "two minds," but the dominant left hemisphere may mistranslate or ignore the signals from the right brain. Manicdepressives , like Woolf, are usually sane and often brilliant people who find their equilibrium shattered by mood swings. In such swings, the two minds or hemispheres become dangerously out of sync, revealing the base terms of human perception. Caramagno argues that future interdisciplinary research into meaning should shift its basis "from a Saussurean linguistic base of self-referential signs and signifiers to a neurological one" based upon knowledge of the brain's two hemispheres. Manic-depression is a periodic biochemical imbalance; in "the rarefied atmosphere of academia, however, many psychoanalytically inclined literary critics cling to the outmoded, simplistic Freudian model of this disorder as a neurotic conflict." Were he alive today, Freud would have abandoned many of his theories in the light of neuroscientific knowledge. Similarly, Caramagno argues, we literary scholars should abandon Freudian models and stop pretending that biology does not affect the mind. He approves certain revisionist approaches and feminist readings, but he is devastating in exposing the absurdities in various reductionist interpretations. Among manic-depressives, the speed, duration, and intensity of swings between wellness, depression, and mania varies in different circumstances. "Circumstances" is a pivotal term. Freudians see the circumstances of Woolf s life as cause for mental instability (if they acknowledge it existed). Caramagno establishes that the cause of Woolf s mood disorder was an inherited manic-depressive syndrome which could be triggered by physical and mental circumstances. With manic-depressives, normal depression, for example, can deepen into a major episode totally out-of-touch with the initial stimulus; this gap between stimulus and response is caused by chemistry rather than neurotic conflict. Before drug therapy, bipolar mood swings could be bypassed or muted by avoiding situations...