Solid Objects in the field

Crumbs

Field/Notes + Richmond-Upon-Thames

Richmond Upon Thames

While devising A Speculative Muddle, I engaged in a process of reading aloud from the earliest edition prints available. The intention was to explore the aura effect of originals and how reading aloud interacted with atmosphere and place.

The following is a fragment of speculative theory. It is a work-in-process updated and edited as new findings are discovered.

In truth, John had been that day to Barnes Common, and there under a furze bush had found a very remarkable piece of iron¹.

In 1917, the Woolfs started the Hogarth Press. The press was started as a hobby, offering a break from their literary endeavours, typesetting and handprinting most publications. Additionally, the press provided a means to publish without the influence and interference involved with external editors and publishing houses. In addition to Solid Objects, two short stories from the same period stand out: Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens, as both involve detailed observations of overlooked objects in the field of vision. Mark on the Wall appeared in Two Stories², their first publication. The standalone, private publication of the short story Kew Gardens³ came along shortly after in 1919 – the demand for the small book was enough that they eventually had to outsource the printing. Though this outsourcing occasionally happened, for the most part, the Woolfs continued to do the handiwork themselves during the operation’s first decade.

I refer to the early edition print of Solid Objects frequently, keeping the reference to Barnes Common in my visual field in an attempt to coordinate the page to the furze bush in question.

Hooks, J (2023) ‘Solid Objects’ in a first edition print of A Haunted House.

An early draft: Peripatetic Devising

Virgina published the short story Solid Objects in the literary journal The Athenæum in 1920⁴. In it, a man called John searches for discarded items on commons, footpaths, and along the Thames throughout Greater London – including Barnes Common. While doing so, John sheds his career, domestic life, and friendship. Much of the literary analysis on the matter relates to allegory related to conflicting ways of being in the world, the obsession of artists and political figures, a search for companionship and when it fails by paring character and acquisitions with temperament and desire ⁵. Instead of speculating on allegories and metaphors of the printed word implies, in the practice of devising on Barnes Common with Solid Objects, I speculate on what appeared in view of Virginia while writing; in particular, what happened in or adjacent to a writing space, in their home or perhaps sitting on a bench on Richmond or Kew Gardens, locations Virginia refers to in her letters and diaries⁶. Inspired by the search for the discarded in Solid Objects, I turn towards the writing practice itself: the tactility and exercises involved when the imaginative and physical of reading, writing, and publication meet. I mainly focus on writing produced at Hogarth House in Richmond, where the Woolfs lived between 1915 and 1924.

The subsequent reprinting of Solid Objects was in a 1943 collection of short stories, A Haunted House⁷, the first after Virginia’s death. A Haunted House is an expanded collection based on Monday or Tuesday⁸, typeset, bound, and printed at Hogarth House in 1921, the first published collection of Virginia Woolf short stories. Both collections include Kew Gardens and Mark on the Wall. Solid Objects only appear in the latter⁹. The title, A Haunted House, gestures to this history of household printing – the press was run out of their home until its bombing during the blitz of 1940. The title of the 1943 collection, in many ways, draws on a spectral connection to their printing practice where visual field, tactility, plot, character, typeset, and physical form accumulate into questions about how our sense of meaning develops beyond the scope of the printed narrative. While awareness of these details (and their influence) may be apparent to visual artists and designers, it frequently is not for those focused on narrative alone. This is the overlooked and taken-for-granted a speculative muddling practice searches for: a kind of pedagogy for sense literacy¹⁰. This practice of analysis draws on literary, visual and ethnographic methodologies, considering how the atmosphere is composed of a combination of sounds, temperatures, smells, and movements of both the landscape and the tourists, locals, and perhaps even mudlarkers digging around on the shores of the Thames. Devising with sense literacy in mind means considering how the mass production of words on a page generates affective worlds.

Devising a speculative method of sense literacy calls on the work of Walter Benjamin (aura effect)¹¹, Roland Barthes (mythos) ¹² and Laura Mulvey (the gaze)¹³ stand out in particular. Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction reflects on the impact of a reproduction of an ‘original’ on ones desires and psyche. Elsewhere, Benjamin speaks to an aura-like draw to images and the writing and lives of Proust, Valery, and Baudelaire to meet psychic desires. Roland Barthes presents us with method and mythos as semiotics discovered at the convergence of image and text found in magazines and newsprint – the magic of a surface, a screen to provide an affective sense of intimate knowledge of something in the body. Mulvey asks us about the unconscious desires met when narrative meets the conventions of what is expected to be seen in frame and on screen. All three ask what is behind and motivating a reading of a mass-reproduced print object. The titles of their essays refer to Myth, Narrative, Visual Illumination, and Pleasure. I look to the titles as reference points for devising an activity that attends carefully to the semiotic tricks of print and mass exchange.

Experience of the aura rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 1939 (reprint 2007)

These exercises of tactility prompted the steps while devising Speculative Muddle involving reading originals in place – a kind of invitation to speculate on the experiential qualities of a writing-reading event at the nexus of narrative, the visual field, printing, typeset, and bookbinding¹⁴. I think with the edition as a skin connecting between surfaces. The book I am holding, ‘a copy’ of a copy, of a copy of a final draft. A final draft that was translated from page to book press. I found this edition for less than twenty pounds via an online shop for used books. It has been passed through (unknown) hands for eighty years. The page faces me with an echo of the others it faced before. (thinking with the skin) – it is another skin, another surface that is transferring the prepersonal between Woolf, the print press, the distributor, the bookseller, then around in circles for the past eight decades until it lands, quite fortuitously, for the task at hand, in a used book shop in Surrey where we can now take it for a walk. Except it’s not the original published edition. The original published edition lives in 1920, in The Athenæum between the poems of Coleridge and notes regarding the film censor board¹⁵. There is a digitised copy living on Internet Archive, I read this on screen in an office.

Fieldnotes 28 January 2023

I read Solid Objects from The Athenaeum on screen – I imagined the reader in 1920, likely still jarred by war and (re)settled by armistice, leafing through the broad pages at a kitchen table or in a club armchair, pipe in hand, murmuring ‘what is this woman at’. When I look up, there is a smoky room of Great Men, a London Scene, confined to their walls, boxed in with each other. When I look up from 1943, there is a woman on a bench with lunch. A break, perhaps from a position in an office or shop. Perhaps the Luftwaffe had made a recent round. I am convinced this edition leads someone to a common trip to Barnes, a wonder about an obsession with objects, collecting and gathering in suburban London.

A conjecture to consider: The book design, page layout, narrative, and imagined reading location were all considered whilst writing and publishing Woolf’s work. Also, to walk-with Woolf to rethink how gender, sexuality, and land/scape are connected in Richmond-Upon-Thames, we need to expand the field of analysis from the words alone to the ‘big picture’ that includes the visual field itself. Virginia Woolf’s penchant for and ongoing practice of writing vivid descriptions of scenes of ordinary life, the Woolfs’ desire to print their work, and VW’s frequent (and often filled) requests that her sister collaborates on the book design indicate a fundamental interest in the frame of things. Her essays frequently spoke of the acts of reading and visual culture.

The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.

Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, 1926

There is a sentence which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people … (The common reader) is guided by instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, the theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument.

Virginia Woolf, ‘The Common Reader’, 1925

I want to make a case for something, or at least a proposition to do something about: this interest in the agreements between seeing, knowing, feeling, subject, and location paired with the Woolf method of transforming and liberating consciousness via rich stream-of-consciousness descriptions of what is (visually) observed in daily life, make a case that print design, narrative, and location of reading and writing are deeply connected for Woolf. I propose how and where you encounter Woolf and with whom determines what aha moments are produced and what knowledge is understood, exchanged, and felt in the body. With this in mind, while devising a walk, when invoking Woolf as a narrator of a specific place, I was careful never to take for granted any of the mechanisms involved in receiving and distributing those descriptions (and analyses) of Barnes, Richmond, and Surrey. In Route Haunting, each element that facilitates an ‘event’ (reading, walking, writing, interacting, observing) is devised with the story in mind and bearing the marks of the ‘original.’

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity … a copy enables the original to meet the beholder halfway … by making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence…

…the concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones.

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936 (reprint 2007)

Virginia Woolf’s words and writing style’s pace, subject, and sounds are thought-with the visual fields the writing is encountered in. The overlaps with the rhythm, routing and site are both in mind whilst going in and out of step with the reader-participant. These rhythmic, performative acts, restaged on a page, are evident in careful consideration of how words appeared on the page – the intentional use of punctuation and sentence structure, paragraphs starting and restarting for rhythm, a particularity about which typeset. A practice first taken on at a desk on Paradise Road in Richmond and maintained at and elsewhere from the Hogarth Press ¹⁶. To embody Johns’s search means observing our own bodily functions at the nexus of the creative and reflective – a start for sensory literacy.

A Gathering of Companions …

The other Others

Barthes, R. (2013) ‘Myth Today’, in Lavers, A. and Howard, R. (trans.) Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 215–281.

Benjamin, W. (2007a) ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Arendt, H. (ed.), Zohn, H. (tran.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 155–200.

Benjamin, W. (2007b) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Arendt, H. (ed.), Zohn, H. (tran.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217–251.

Elkins, J. (2009) Visual Literacy. Routledge.

Jenkins, A. (2023) Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics: From Pen to Print. Springer Nature.

Mao, D. (1998) ‘Virginia Woolf: The Test of Production’, in Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 26–89.

Marcus, L. (2010) ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press’, in Humm, M. (ed.) The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 263–279.

Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen. Oxford Academic, 16(3), pp. 6–18.

Pink, S. (2011) ‘Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception’, Qualitative research: QR. SAGE Publications, 11(3), pp. 261–276.

Sim, L. (2016) Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Routledge.

Woolf, L. (1989) Letters of Leonard Woolf. Edited by F. Spotts. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

from Virginia Woolf

Woolf, V. and Woolf, L. (1917) Two Stories. Richmond: The Hogarth Press.

Woolf, V. (1920) ‘Solid Objects’, The Athenaeum, (4721), pp. 543–545.

Woolf, V. (1921) Monday or Tuesday & Other Stories. Richmond: The Hogarth Press.

Woolf, V. (1925) ‘The Common Reader’, in The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, pp. 11–12.

Woolf, V. (1926) ‘The Cinema’, The Nation and Athenaeum, XXXIX(18), pp. 380–382.

Woolf, V. (1943) A Haunted House. Edited by L. Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press.

Woolf, V. (1982) ‘Monday, April 1st [1935]’, in Olver Bell, A. (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Four: 1931-1935. London: Harvest/HBJ Book, p. 295.

Woolf, V. (2023) ‘Wednesday 18 June [1919]’, in Bell, A. O. (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1 (1915-19). London: Granta Books, pp. 363–365.

Machine Retrievable Complete Works

Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Collection, ed. James M. Haule, Kindle (Hash Books, 2017).

The Routes and Places anarchive has been designed at a width of 900px – this was selected as it provides readers on tablets and desktops a uniform size to encounter the text in. However, if this is read on a phone – as is likely the case for many who use QR codes found in the print zine – they have a different experience. It is an experience of scrolling through contained images and texts, of reading through longer form essays and fieldnotes. The user interface of this, the Route Haunting anarchive blends Visual branding (color, font, background), print media (such as this notepad paper background), and with the wireframes and content sequence social media platform provide. Some content is missing – there is no space for response (comments, emoticons), nor are some technologies for web and tablet platforms available to phone devices (including VR content requiring goggles).

It is not in the scope of this project to produce a qualitative study of user experience, what is in the scope is accountability to what has been accomplished here in research design and demonstrated in design practice. I know a UX designer or two may be interested in having a conversation about this …

Footnotes

1
‘Solid Objects’, The Athenaeum, no. 4721 (22 October 1920): 543–45.
2
Woolf and Woolf, 1917
3
Woolf 1919
4
(Woolf, 1920)
5
Mao, 1998; Sim, 2016
6
Woolf, 1982, 2023
7
Woolf, 1943
8
Woolf, 1921
9
Marcus, 2010
10
Sense literacy has its own genealogy, a point to return to in subsequent locations. See Elkins, 2009; Pink, 2011
11
Benjamin, 2007
12
Barthes, 2013
13
Mulvey, 1975
14
See Jenkins, 2023 and Leonard Woolf’s letters published in Woolf, 1989, chap. 4.
15
Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, The Athenaeum, no. 4721 (22 October 1920): 543–45.
16
Marcus, ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press’; Peter Fullagar, Virginia Woolf in Richmond (Aurora Metro Publications Ltd., 2018).

The short URL of the present article is: https://routesandplaces.co.uk/zine/5vaq