Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (review)

Quite apart from the striking biographical parallels between Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, the affinities in their work are thoroughly compelling. Both sought to come to terms with what they perceived to be a change in the character of experience in the period in which they lived, a change which was intimately bound up with a sense of disjointed temporality and a dislocated perspective on history. This was expressed in a shared preoccupation with, among other things, the tenuous boundaries between history and fiction, the function and effect of generic distinctions, the relation between art and politics, and, indeed, with the sort of truth specific to works of art. Ultimately, they were concerned with the possibility of breaking with history insofar as it purveys and perpetuates structures of oppression, not by ignoring it (as if that were possible) but by transforming the mode of its conveyance into the present. Compelling though these correspondences may be, the differences in their style, disposition, language and tradition make the examination of the relation between Woolf and Benjamin a formidable task, which is no doubt part of the reason why Spiropoulou's is the first book-length study to undertake it.

Spiropoulou, as the subtitle of her book suggests, proposes to present Woolf in "constellation" with Benjamin. Although this Benjaminian term has been much overused in the literature, the idea in this context is applicable. A constellation, in Benjamin, is the image produced by a certain configuration of discrete phenomena that does not sacrifice their specificity. As such, it provides a promising model with which to address the significance of the interrelation between Benjamin's and Woolf's work without leveling their differences.

After two introductory chapters defining modernity and historiography in rather general terms, Spiropoulou's "constellation" consists of six chapters, each devoted to one of Woolf's novels, discussed with reference to her relevant non-fictional writings, and set in relation to a figure or theme in Benjamin's work. The first of these addresses Jacob's Room in the context of her essay, "On Not Knowing Greek," in which Woolf suggests that the gesture of drawing on the tradition of antiquity has less to do with antiquity itself than with a gendered projection onto a foreign and obscure epoch of what "we" moderns lack. Spiropoulou reads Jacob's Room as rehearsing and so undermining such a masculine and masculinist appropriation of history. The next chapter focuses on Orlando and proposes, unconvincingly, to read the eponymous protagonist as Benjamin's "Angel of History" insofar as both are perceived as effecting a certain redemption of the past by working through past traumas. This reading, which reduces the complex and highly evocative image of the Angel of History to the assertion of contemporary cliché, is typical of Spiropoulou's reference to Benjamin in the book, which tends to be derivative, rarely actually engaging with his texts in any depth. This production of assertions out of Benjamin's eminently figurative prose is carried over to Spiropoulou's treatment of Woolf, whose literary writing she often reads as being assertive, despite this being at odds with the very theories of authority and artistic production she discusses.

The subsequent chapter addresses the incongruous temporalities of history and nature in Woolf's fiction, especially in To the Lighthouse, with reference to Benjamin's obscure notion of natural history, which Adorno influentially took up and defined in dialectical form as taking what appears most historical to be natural and what appears most natural to be historical. The fourth, devoted to The Years, is developed around the common trope in both Woolf's and Benjamin's work of dreaming and awakening, which Spiropoulou relates to their shared interest in the ways that the everyday is mystified in the activities of daily life and obscured as an object of historical recollection. This theme is returned to in the final chapter, which looks at Woolf's late attempt to write a "real" historical work, intended...