This is the second time I’ve read Jacob’s Room recently, but
the first time I’ve written about it. It is the kind of book you need to allow
to seep in, it is Woolf in her experimental phase in which she is nebulous, the
details seem to slide past the eye too easily, and yet each scene is rich with
meaning. It is a hard book to encapsulate in a few hundred words.
Jacob’s Room follows the early life of a promising young
man. Jacob Flanders is a man with a mind, with potential, but he is also a man
with a future that never comes off. We follow Jacob from a childhood holiday in
Cornwall, to his early life in Scarborough, to his time in university, to a
trip across Greece and Italy, to his eventual (though practically unmentioned)
end.
What is notable about Jacob is the way in which he is
constructed almost as much from the people around him as from direct
interaction with the character himself. We see Jacob through the eyes of his
mother “And Jacob is such a handful; so
obstinate already”, through the eyes of his lovers, his friends and
acquaintances, through the eyes of passersby. Jacob is almost as notable by his
absence as his presence, which is both difficult to achieve and quite
inspirational when pulled off in the way that Woolf pulls it off here.
When reading Woolf’s diaries, I was struck by how she
referred to her writing in ‘scenes’ and yet I think in Jacob’s Room it is
possible to see exactly what she means here. Woolf progresses the narrative of
the story through scenes, some directly connected and others less so, yet
though they might seem at times to be jumbled or unrelated when considered as a
whole this works extremely well. It makes me wonder whether Woolf had the eye
of a movie director, whether if she was living now would she be making pictures
instead of stories? Certainly her work has a movie-esque quality to it as they
writer’s eye pans across a scene and focuses in on the unexpected. Like here,
when Woolf is distracted as the character, Jacob, has walking across London on
a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral. At this point Jacob is a mere echo, and the writer
has focused upon another target:
“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.”
As always I am knocked breathless with admiration at Woolf’s
extraordinary ability to capture the essence of a person in so few words. This
is one of her core strengths: her ability to see an express people. Also her beautiful
writing. As always, astonishing.
There is something meta-fictional about Jacob’s Room. In it
Woolf is keen to show us, always and often, that this is a story, that it is
fictional, that there is a writer behind it and the writer is both showing us a
truth and deceiving us. Woolf herself appears as a presence in this book. Not
in the way other, later writers have done by inserting themselves as a physical
character, but in a subtler way, reminding us that she is there by being
distracted, by changing her focus, by being direct, as she is here:
“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.
Such is the manner of
our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.”
This short, perceptive statement is both true of our
connection to fictional characters and similarly to the real. The idea that
people, that life is a shadow is nothing new and a concept that certainly every
Buddhist will easily recognise. Despite this, Woolf still asks us to care about
Jacob, to follow his triumphs and his sadnesses, perceive his difficulties and
his weaknesses. And we do, or I did anyway.
Another shadowy presence in the book is the spectre of war.
This is a book based in the pre-Great War years, and though the characters do
not entirely appreciate that war is coming it casts a shadow over both their
presence and their future. Woolf plays time games here, showing us both the
present and the future. Like here when one transient character reflects on some
others:
“Kind Mr. Bowley and
dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley had rooms at the Albany. Rose was
re-born every evening precisely as the clock struck eight. All four were
civilisation’s triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English
language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost
always dumb. Maele beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the
onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them – Helen and Jimmy – and likened
them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you
ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards’ distance? As she passed
him his cup, there was a quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw what was up – asked Jimmy
to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. For my own part, I find it
extremely difficult to interpret songs without words. And now Jimmy feeds crows
at Flanders and Helen visits hospitals. Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked,
as Rose Shaw said.”
Life is transient, life is shadows, life is a dream: these
seem to be the messages Woolf is conveying with Jacob’s Room. Whatever our
potential, whatever we want to achieve, it can all be blown away by history and
all that is left of us is the scraps of paper we leave behind and impressions
in peoples’ memories.
It is a dense book, though short and seemingly concise. It
is dense and complex and difficult to pin down. I could write an essay about it
(and people do I am sure) but really it is simply better for you to read it. It
is not an easy read. I have read it twice and still I feel I have barely
scratched the surface of its meaning. Isn’t that what makes the best kind of
fiction? The one which inspires us, with forces us to look with eyes wide open,
forces us to see? Jacob’s Room certainly does this, though not from a
superficial reading. It is a book I will return to again.
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