Description and the Pictorial in Jacob's Room

Abstract

When Jacob's Room was published in 1922 it was immediately hailed as a radically innovative text that broke with tradition and established the groundwork for a new kind of fiction. Analogies were made with other art forms: in its nonlinear modernity it was likened to a portfolio rather than a novel; in its tense, syncopated movements, its staccato impulsiveness, the influence of jazz was discerned; its narrative method was defined as snapshot photography, with a highly sensitive, perfected camera.'1 More recent criticism, with the hindsight of what was to follow, tends to consider it an interesting, and limited, early experiment that provided Woolf with the basis for a technique which would lead to far things.2 It is not my purpose here to argue thatJacob's Room is greater or lesser than any of Woolf s works. But certainly its crucial place in her canon has not been adequately recognized.3 For in it she begins to explore what was to be an enduring preoccupation of hers: the relation and the boundaries between art and life. She does so not by creating an artist character as in many of her works but by drawing on the strategies and conventions of the visual arts, notably painting and sculpture. Woolf is not restrained, however, by the limits of an ut pictura poesis tradition. Certain passages in Jacob's Room do indeed recall painting-after all, Woolf herself said that all great writers are great colourists, just as they are great musicians into the bargain: they always contrive to make their scenes glow and darken and change to the eye-but they go beyond mere recall.4 I will argue that Woolf creates descriptive textual units that, rather than presenting an image of fixed pictorial stability, instead present a kind of kinetic dismantling of their own borders. In this way life and art are constantly juxtaposed, not to merge and dissolve into union, but to reiterate their perpetual relation. With the figure