Street Haunting: A London Adventure Flashcards
(18 cards)
Author
Virginia Woolf
- Intro
- Excuse to go rambling the streets of London- buy a lead pencil
- Winter evening - sky is bright like champagne, socialibility of streets are grateful
- not look for shade, irresponsibility of night
- become not ourselves- anonymous trampers
- china bowl- old women says youll starve one day
- Englishman and secrets of his soul
- Mr Lloyd made stain on carpet
- Mr Cummings says hes the devil
- The eye is a seeker after buried treasure, brain sleeps perhaps as it looks
- beautful London street= islands of light, groves of darkness, tree-sprinkled, grass grown space, night is flding herself to sleep naturally
- stirring of leaf and twigs, owl hooting, far away rattle of train
- “But this is London, we are reminded; high
among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light–windows” - low stars- lamps
- see a woman
- stop
- digging deeeper than eye approves
- be content with surfaces only - before waking oh human suffering
- observes further
- dwarf
- eye has strange property= rests only on beauty
- like butterfly, seeks colour and basks in warmth
- “what then is it like to be a dwarf?”
- she came in with thwo women of normal size= looked like giants
- she wore an peevish, apologetic expressin like the deformed do
- needed their kindness but resented it
- became confident when everyone looked at her normal sized foot
- after buying, the excitement went away
- apologetic expression came back and she was again dwarf only
- dwarfs dance
- two blind men
- p3 p3
The passage describes the hidden lives of society’s marginalized individuals—crippled, blind, and impoverished—who dwell in the upper rooms of old buildings in areas like Holborn and Soho. These people engage in unusual trades, from gold beating to selling oddities like china umbrella handles. Despite their hardships, life among them appears strangely tolerable, even fantastical. However, this illusion shatters when confronted with stark images of suffering, such as a starving Jew or an abandoned old woman. These destitute figures exist in unsettling proximity to the city’s wealth and luxury, lying near theaters, shops, and opulent furnishings, highlighting the stark contrast between poverty and prosperity.
- walking on
- everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty,
- can build imaginary houses with everything you see and dismantle and build again
- imagine the jewels on us and how the pearls would change life
- 02:00-03:00 lamps are burning white in the streets of Mayfair
- Whats more absurd than 18:00 walking to the Strand to buy a pencil
- On a balcony in June wearing pearls- what could be more absurd
- Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which
bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? - Or is it only when give rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?
- 2nd hand bookstore
- n the second hand bookstore, we find anchorage in the being, balance ourselves after the splendorous and miseries of the streets
- Second hand books are wild, homeless and have a charm that the domesticated volumes in the library lack
- can run into the stranger that will with luck become best friend
In a bookshop, one forms fleeting connections with forgotten figures preserved in old books. A drowned poet lingers through his delicate, formal verses, evoking the melancholy sound of an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. Indomitable spinsters recount their hardships and admired sunsets in Greece during Queen Victoria’s youth. Travelers document their journeys—touring Cornwall’s tin mines, sketching portraits on the Rhine, measuring pyramids, enduring isolation, converting people in swamps, and settling in India or China before returning to quiet lives in Edmonton. Among them, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels, and scholars chip away at the texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Meanwhile, fiction’s endless tide flows on, telling tales of Arthur and Laura’s love, separation, sorrow, and reunion—echoing the literary norms of the Victorian era.
number of books- infinite- glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, like the street outside when you pass someone and get a glimpse of their conversation. Who is Kate, why are they fighting- no nothing but the mention of her name
- ah pencil!
- Little rod lay its bar across the velocity of life- one must always make a choice- cant just enjoy
- Not long ago fabricated excuse of buying something- ah remember pencil
- turn back to go buy pencil, obey command- another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist
- lets put off buying the pencil and go look for this person- realise its oneself
- But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered
- Six months ago, stood precisely were we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life
- He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the
past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil
- quarral and ending
- adventure new room- lives and characters in atmosphere
- people been quarrelling- husband and wife
- he couldn’t find the pencils- wife could- how could he do without her
- quarrel was mad up by standing there in silence for a while
- In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty
- illusion that one is not tethered to a single
mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others - to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of
adventures - own home is still comforting
> Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the
china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here–let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it
with reverence–is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.
Literary studies is a space of:
- INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM;
- IMAGINATION;
- EXPERIMENTATION;
- EXPLORATION
Noticing
HOW DO WE EXPERIENCE ART? HOW DO WE NEED TO READ SOMETHING FOR IT TO MOVE US?
When we read with care, we notice that words and sentences do more than merely describe; they engage, they convince; they conjure; they evoke
- Reading with close attention deepens and enriches our sense of the ordinary world, and how lyrical and lovely it can be;
- What do we notice when we read a work of fiction? What distinguishes it from
Explication
Seeing- what is being said, what are we looking at
Unpacking- how is the author inhabiting the capacity of the language? How is the author creating the aesthetic environment that gives importance to what we are reading?
Explanation: What is being done at the level of craft/technique
Evaluation: Does the text succeed? What does success look like?
Here we might think about how we develop the art of questioning: for this class, we have an essay by Virginia Woolf written in 1927; Street Haunting: A London Adventure is an essay that engages the city as a quintessentially modernist space; when we read it, rather than simply scratching our heads at the strange phrasing, if we slow down and work through it, we can see that she’s speaking to a set of concerns that are broadly familiar: the notion of the city and its commodity spectacle, the city as a space that stimulates the senses, awakens our imagination and sparks ideas and connections if we are left to wander it on our own terms;
Strategies for serious noticing
- Whats going on
Whats the premise
- Who is speaking
What can we surmise about our speaker?
- Who is being adressed
Is it introspective, or outward-directed, and how?
- To what end
What imagery is the detail creating?
Leaving a room of one’s own
The pretext of the pencil expedition is an excuse to escape one’s own mind;
- “Street Haunting” starts with the escape from the house, the room of one’s own.
- To enter the public sphere, the anonymity of the crowds, is to shed soft domestic comforts, the familiar sense of oneself: “For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforces the memories of our own experience.” Look around your room later and think about how one object can open out into a whole set of memories which may not necessarily be positive;
- Woolf’s room—with its china bowl and the brown stain on the carpet—is a place of fixity, whereas the street knows nothing but movement and flow, the self unsplit and uncontained. The search for the pencil, the transitional object, is the search for connectedness, for undifferentiated oneness, when the boundaries between self and world thin to their most tenuous.
On the street:
SEEING:
“…a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.”
GHOSTLY FIGURES:
“here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them.”
The act of wandering, walking, slipping away from the constraints of time; the idea of drifting through the urban milieu, drawn by hidden alleyways and crowds, should put us in mind of a certain literary figure:
The flâneur vs the flâneuse
COMPARE WOOLF:
“…a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye”
WITH BAUDELAIRE:
““a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness … an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’.”
The figure of the flaneur is a nineteenth century symbol of privilege and leisure, the idea of the artist who submits himself (note, him) to the transient experience of the city; the flaneur is a passionate spectator, not simply drifting through the scene, he is both recorder and reflection; But the idea of being a “phantom of the streets”, someone who can dissolve into the flix of daily life, is a very masculinized fantasy; the privilege of invisibility is widely only afforded to men; But flaneur, at its earliest simply means “a person who wanders” – it’s a genderless concept until theearly 1800s where it begins to be defined around the personification of a certain kind of idle man;
- Woolf, who comes out of certain Victorian ideas about the health benefits of walking, sought and celebrated the perogative of women to walk the streets of London; Here we might evolve a notion of the flaneuse; for the flaneuse walking alone, there is always the concern that her safety is at risk, that she will be challenged; but Woolf conveys through her walking subject he importance, the necessity of experiencing the world for yourself;
Walking
Women walks
So if we cast ourselves forward in time briefly, we can see that initiatives like these, which happen in Cape Town and its surrounds on a monthly basis, are expressions of the same energy; we might then say that what we can see in Woolf’s essay is an attention to the gendered politics of space;
- This might move us to think about how cities are ordered according to particular understandings of who is supposed to be there: in Street Haunting, the pretext of the shopping trip takes the idea that the only legitimate presence of/for women in the city is as shoppers, and subverts that;
The unseen:
> “For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and
basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen
herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the
whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average
unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure
angles and relationships.”
But of course, it’s not only a celebration of the city and its excitements; it’s also aware of what is not seen; Part of street haunting is also dipping into consciousnesses that are otherwise remote (“inaccessible lanterns” she calls them later). Points of view become fluid. Woolf was interested in giving voice to those small zones of mystery known as other people, through a sort of imaginative projection that we might today label a form of psychic colonization. Midway through the essay, the narrator temporarily inserts herself into the mind of a dwarf trying on shoes in a shop. “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?” she asks. Afterwards, she describes seeing two blind men, an old woman, a bearded Jew. With a fair amount of bourgeois condescension, she speculates about their “fantastic” lives and in the process exoticizes their vulnerability—they cannot escape their bodies as easily as Woolf. For her, they symbolize the fringes of society, a state that both excites and unsettles her, giving physical form to the “outside” she craves to know. “Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others,” she writes.
And Return
“Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet.”
