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aesthetic appreciation, Keynes emphasized the ethical care that a reader
should bring to books:  He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd
over sheep. Forster, for his part, in a radio broadcast titled  In My Li-
brary, subsumed Keynes s aesthetic pleasure in the  outside of books to
the pleasure he takes in  the words in them. Keynes s approach, he im-
plies, is  non-adult, because it fetishizes the physical book, however beau-
tiful, as a mere commodity. Words for Forster are  the wine of life, and
reading is a  spiritual activity, one that enables an individual reader, in a
library as  unregimented as his own, to achieve a sort of consubstantiation
with past and present writers.
Virginia Woolf s novels, in particular Jacob s Room, To the Lighthouse, and
especially The Waves, place demands on readers equal to those of the diffi-
cult experimental texts of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and other contemporaries.
And Woolf also thought, as they did, that writers should  train our taste
and  make it submit to some control in order to recognize the  common
quality that literary masterpieces possess. But despite these similarities to
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her male counterparts, Woolf sharply differs from them in her vision of
readers and writers as intimate, symbiotically connected partners in an ef-
fort to increase human sympathy. For her, the reader and the (modernist)
writer were  or might be  joined by an ethic that promoted sympathetic
and noncoercive human relations, as opposed to one that affirmed the ro-
mantic individualism and patriarchal authoritarianism of those male mod-
ernists who demanded conformity to ostensibly transcendent aesthetic
standards. In  The Patron and the Crocus, for example, Woolf expressed a
keen recognition of the mutual responsibilities of reader and writer:  To
know whom to write for is to know how to write, she reminded writers.
For writers and readers  are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one
flourishing if the other flourishes . . . the fate of literature depends upon
their happy alliance.
Woolf s nonhierarchical, feminist, and politically egalitarian approach
to reading is clearest in the essay,  How Should One Read a Book? with
which she concluded her collection, The Second Common Reader (1932). Em-
phasizing the interrogative uncertainty of the essay s title, as well as her
inability sufficiently to  answer the question for myself, Woolf offered
her readers a curious, paradoxical bit of advice about how to read:  The
only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to
take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to
come to your own conclusions. By doing this, Woolf thought,  unprofes-
sional or inexpert readers could become more adept at negotiating, and
thus help to improve the quality of, the books being written in a time of
increasingly prodigious publishing, when  books written in all languages
by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the
shelf.
More importantly, however, from a political perspective, in this essay
Woolf alludes to her feminist polemic A Room of One s Own (1929) when
she argues for the necessary independence of readers from the opinions of
male academics who insisted on readers acquiescence to some version of
the Arnoldian standard of  the best that has been thought and said. Woolf
writes:
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries
and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon
what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those
sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions
there we have none. (234)
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Todd Avery and Patrick Brantlinger
A Room of One s Own, one of the germinal texts of twentieth-century femi-
nism, is also an example of the narrative criticism that Woolf wrote in
order to  seduce her (female) audience into a practice of reading, writing,
and critical evaluation that would foster the development of an alterna-
tive, female literary tradition and thus liberate women from the literary
and social  laws and conventions imposed on them by their canon-build-
ing fathers.
Throughout her adult life, Woolf s continual meditations on the art of
reading also adumbrated poststructuralist ideas about language and eth-
ics; she emphasized the textuality of human character and individuals
potential for empathy toward others. For her, reading literary texts was
similar to reading the  character,  personality, or  soul of another hu-
man being. Her short story  An Unwritten Novel and her essay  Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown contain two of Woolf s most famous attempts at
reading character in this way. Her most experimental novel, The Waves
(1931), anticipates poststructuralist notions of identity and the
deconstructionist critique of metaphysics (that is, of the transcendental
signified) in its representation, through the form of six interlaced solilo-
quies, of  the ceaseless interplay of linguistic deferral and difference (Moi
1985: 111). Woolf s writer-figure in The Waves, Bernard, notes the linguis-
tic constructedness of individual and group identity:  we melt into each
other with phrases (16). Another character, Jinny, whose fascination with
physical and sartorial appearances places her in a unique position to de-
code surfaces, voices Woolf s ideas about the textuality of personality, and
thus about the similarity between reading texts and reading people:  we
decipher the hieroglyphs written on other people s faces (175).
Additionally, the act of reading was an ethical activity for Woolf in that
the discovery of beauty in works of literature and the recognition of indi-
viduals textual interrelatedness carried a distributional imperative:  per-
haps one of the invariable properties of beauty, Woolf writes in  Reading,
 is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must
make; some act we must dedicate. Woolf seems to have in mind an idea
similar to that which Elaine Scarry has recently expressed in On Beauty and
Being Just (1999), where she writes of  the pressure beauty exerts toward
the distributional. . . . Through its beauty, the world continually recom-
mits us to a rigorous standard of . . . care (80 1).
The Bloomsbury group has often been criticized for being a clique of
social and aesthetic elitists. However, along with that of many other mod-
ernist writers (Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Wells, Shaw, Lewis, Vita Sackville-West
and Harold Nicolson, to name a few), their involvement with early radio
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broadcasting calls into question the neatness of this Manichaean separa-
tion of  the intellectuals and  the masses. Their participation in radio
also illuminates the democratic beliefs that informed their ideas about read-
ing. As Allison Pease notes,  the relationship between mass culture and
modernis[m] . . . was more fluid and more complicated than we have yet
to recognize (2000: 77). When the British Broadcasting Company (later
Corporation) took to the airwaves in late 1922, near the end of that annus
mirabilis of modernist literature, it brought into being a new type of read-
ing public  one christened in the title of the BBC s publication, the Lis- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]