Virginia Woolf: vještina pisanja i ne/obični čitatelj
VIRGINIA WOOLF: THE ART OF WRITING AND THE UN/COMMON READER

Summary/Abstract: In a busy way of life today it seems that people do not have spare time to devote to reading classic novels and the modern consumerist spirit of society can be reflected in all aspects of life and creation, and inevitably also in the fine art as well as in writing fiction. Culture, which has always been a social initiator, sublimating scientific knowledge and personal artistic expression, now has the difficult task of fighting for its place in society, surrounded by countless social networks and platforms and other modern technologies. In terms of books and literature, there are electronic books to compete with them, which on the one hand contribute to easier accessibility, but at the same time destroy that nice feeling of holding a book in your hands, flipping through the pages and underlining the lines that leave a special impression on us. Our lifestyle that moves in bursts demands as much information and pleasure in as little time as possible, so the essay, as a shorter literary form, could be of interest to contemporary readers. In an essay, in a relatively short form, the writer presents their thoughts, ideas and views on a topic they considers interesting, so perhaps the time has come to reconsider the essay, not as an inferior literary form compared to the novel, but rather as one that creates a particular relationship between the reader and the writer. This relationship has always been interactive and fluid, and there are even opinions that, in order to understand how to read a book, one should try to write. This idea is considered by Virginia Woolf in her essay “How Should One Read a Book”(2005, 167). Within the genre hierarchy, the essay is somewhat underestimated compared to the novel, so it sometimes represents a so-called “secondary genre,” even though both first appeared at around the same time. Virginia Woolf’s essays and her literary criticism have long been neglected in relation to her poetic novels. Woolf, who is considered one of the best modernist writers and the founder of the feminist movement and feminist literary criticism, can rightfully be considered the first significant woman essayist of the modern age. In the light of her essay writing, the viewpoints related to the role of the writer in the writing process will be considered as well as the equally important role of the reader in this mutual relationship. Just as the writer should wrap an imaginary curtain around the reader, introduce them to a particular fictional world, so should the reader be able to enter the writer’s world, free of all prejudices. Literary stimulation involves a process of giving and receiving, in which there are no dominant sides. Moreover, instead of the text exciting only the passive, receptive mind, the expectations of each individual reader influence the text (Ondek Laurence 90). So, the relationship is mutual, and literary texts should stimulate both the body and mind of the reader. In her work, Woolf dealt with writers and their writing skills. One of the main qualities a writer must have in order to be successful, according to Woolf, is impartiality, in the sense of having a purified mind, a mind that is free from any prejudices and influences. In the essay A Room of One’s Own, she praises Shakespeare’s mind, which was “naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided”, meaning that Shakespeare possessed the ability to distance himself from the text, to put his personality aside, and at the same time to give us the most subjective experience. While in her novels she was constantly searching for new expression, experimenting with technique, and letting her poetic sensibility and impressionistic aesthetics develop freely, in her essays she mostly kept traditional expression. Unlike novels, which are more complex, poetic and meditative, essays are clearer, more accessible and potentially more interesting to a wider audience. We should not ignore the fact that Woolf earned money from her journalism for the first ten years of her working life and was aware that her earnings depended on the readership of her texts, but at the same time she was also aware of the potential of a wider audience that she could reach through newspapers. Woolf highly valued the essay and believed that only good writers could be good essayists. She wrote essays on a wide variety of topics, including architecture, streets, houses, the cinema, the radio, London, travel, painting, as well as critical essays on novels, considering both contemporary writers and writers from the past, while also writing on the modern essay and modern literary forms, and about the process of writing and reading. One characteristic of her essays is that they are very fluid, often move from one form to another. The essay turns to artistic prose or vice versa, with recommendations on how to read turning into instructions on writing, and personal essays turn into poetic prose, such as the essays “Street Haunting” or “The Death of the Moth”, in which Woolf completely releases her poetic spirit. From the essayists from the past, Woolf found a role model in Montaigne, pointing out the importance of communication with the reader, the rejection of ego, the use of simple, accessible linguistic expression, and the subtle storytelling technique, the so-called “unmethodical method”, where the writer seemingly follows their stream of consciousness and randomly presents viewpoints and ideas, but actually covers a particular topic in a very selective and thoughtful order. Woolf laid out the basic principles of writing modern fiction in her famous essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction”. She calls writers like Wells, Bennet, and Galsworthy “materialists”, who write about unimportant subjects; that they use up enormous amounts of knowledge and expend enormous effort to present the unimportant and transitory as true and permanent. These writers write superficially, describing external details, remain at the level of characterization, they do not go into the mind of the characters, because they are not truly interested in them. They think that a novel is good if the characters are real and the descriptions are consistent. Woolf questions what reality is and who judges reality. She points to great novels, such as War and Peace, Tristram Shandy and Madame Bovary, in which when thinking about a character, the reader gets an image of the things he sees through his own eyes, thoughts about war, love, peace, family life, or the immortality of the soul. Woolf concludes that in all these novels, all these great novelists showed us what they wanted us to see through a character. If they were not able to do so, they would not be novelists; they would instead be poets, historians or pamphleteers. She praises modernist writers for their spirituality and their efforts to make fiction new and relevant. Woolf despises photographic description, which is reduced to superficial looking from the outside, without any depth. Such writers are not interested in the spirit, but the body itself, but the material side also consists of a spiritual and emotional component, and these should be aroused in the reader. In her essay “Modern Fiction” Woolf warns that life slips away; and maybe without life nothing else is worth the effort. She compares life to a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope that surrounds us from the beginning of our consciousness to its end, and the writer’s task is to convey this varying and unknown spirit to us, because the real structure of fiction is different from that of traditional belief. She is also against fixed methods, because no method is forbidden, except falsehood and pretense. Woolf argues that any method is good, as long as it helps the writer express what they want, and at the same time brings the reader closer to the writer’s intention. She believes that the real material of fiction does not actually exist, because everything around us can be the subject of writing, every feeling, thought, or state of mind and spirit. We need to look for new forms and narrative techniques in the footsteps of modernist writers, going beyond the tradition of the photographic representation of reality and beyond the limit of testimony, and turn to personal experience, impressions, and the subconscious. Woolf can also be considered the founder of feminist criticism, so in that context we should consider the texts in which she deals with the inferior position of women in society, the obstacles they encounter in the process of literary creation and the conditions necessary for independent work, and even the literary forms and sentences that correspond to their nature. Virginia Woolf became a role model for generations of feminists who accepted the view that women “think back through their mothers”. Rachel Bowlby argues that Woolf was the first writer to point to the works of women whose existence was overshadowed by the male canon (178). Due to the lack of women’s tradition in writing, limited access to society, and therefore limited experience, as well as choking home and family obligations, double standards, prejudices and stereotypes in attitudes about women in general, and especially about those who dared to write, women encountered countless obstacles. The shorter essays “Professions for Women” and “Women and Fiction” talk about the development of women’s creativity, the lack of tradition in women’s writing, and the changes that women introduced in literary creation throughout history. Since women got the right to vote, they were now slowly entering the business, intellectual and political spheres of society, so they could use their new experiences in social criticism. Self-censorship is seen as a big obstacle in women’s creativity and only after a woman has killed “the angel in the house” in herself, will she be able to develop free thinking and start controlling her life. A woman can become who she is, that is, explore herself and her needs. In A Room of One’s Own, long considered a feminist manifesto, Woolf clearly states the important conditions that have to be fulfilled if a woman wants to be a writer. In a material sense, she must have a space to work, a room of her own and the financial means to be independent and have time to devote to writing. In a psychological sense, an androgynous mind is important, a mind that will unite male and female experiences in a whole. Woolf also considers what form of writing is ideal for women. She claims that women’s and men’s perceptions differ, that women see, feel and evaluate differently than men, and so their literary expression is different. The “masculine type of sentence”, which was common in the 19th century, does not suit a woman in the 20th century at all. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë stumbled over it, and only Jane Austen created a perfectly natural, harmonious sentence that served her well and which she never gave up. Here, Woolf expresses a clear view that there is a connection between language and gender difference, which is socially and historically conditioned. One type of sentence will suit men and another type will suit women. Women need to find their own sentence that will best suit their way of expressing themselves. At the same time, she invites women to try to write in all genres, including travelogues, biographies, reviews and scientific books, because books influence each other. Woolf paid great attention to the role of the reader in literary creation, so some critics consider her the founder of the reader-response theory (Lee 1999, 79; Marcus, 148; Bowlby, 15). This theory is focused on the reader and his experience related to reading fiction, and not on the author and their intentions, the psychology of the reader, or the form and content of the work itself. In this theory, literature is understood as a performance art existing only during the process of reading, where the literary text does not have a fixed and final meaning or value, but rather readers themselves close the circle with their own, individual interpretation. There is no “exact” meaning; it is formed in the interaction between the reader and the text. In this process, the reader is recognized as a performing agent, who participates in the “real existence” of the work, and gives it the final seal with their own interpretation. Woolf was extremely interested in the two-way dialogue between readers and writers. Books change their readers, they teach readers how to read them, and writers must accept these conditions that change them. Books change when they are re-read, and different generations read individual texts differently. Readers must therefore always be aware that they are not isolated individuals, but part of a long sequence of readers who participate in the dialogue. (Lee 2000, 91). Slavery to authority means destroying the spirit of freedom, and this is what the reader must avoid at all costs. They should be guided by their own impulse and not accept advice from outside. The complexity of reading is manifested in two steps: the first is the process of receiving impressions with understanding, and the second step includes making judgments about these impressions, which is created when the impressions settle and the details fit into their places. Then a more objective comparison of two literary works is possible, the reader is in the role of a judge, not the writer’s friend. The reader must not be either too strict or too sensitive, and when they maintain a balance, their evaluations and standards will influence the writer as well. One of the possible goals of reading is to arouse the reader’s own inspiration. A reader might begin to write in order to better understand the writer’s creative process. Woolf writes that perhaps the quickest way to understand the basic parts of a novelist’s actions is not to read, but to write; in making our own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Woolf points out that reading a book the way a book should be read requires special engagement, imagination, insight and the ability to judge, meaning that the reader might conclude that literature is too complex and that they will not be able to contribute to its criticism. Woolf argues that the reader must retain their role, which is primarily related to reading and emphasizes that we still have our responsibilities as readers, and even our importance. The standards we set and the evaluations we make slip into the air and become part of the atmosphere that writers breathe as they work. The ultimate goal, according to Woolf, is for books to become stronger, richer and more diverse. If we accept the idea that books become people who long to be heard, then through them a double function is realized, the function of writing and reading, which simultaneously enables articulation for both the writer and the reader (Dusinberre). In the essay “The Common Reader”, whose title is taken from Samuel Johnson’s text The Life of Gray in which he mentions the common reader, liberated from literary prejudices, who possesses a healthy power of reasoning and who ultimately brings about the evaluation and recognition of artistic values, Woolf analyzes the characteristics of the ordinary reader. To the above-mentioned qualities, she adds a certain naivety and inexperience, as well as the pleasure of reading, which give the reader special qualities. An ordinary reader is different from a critic and a learned man, for he has a weaker education and abilities, but they compensate for this with the drive that leads them to form a kind of a whole on their own from the literary text. They do not read to gain knowledge or to correct other people’s opinions, but by reading they creates something that will give them pleasure, stimulate feelings and make them think. The reader’s demands are usually misdirected, prose is required to be credible, poetry to be false, biography to be flattering, and history to support our own prejudices, writes Woolf in the essay “How One Should Read a Book.” These prejudices are only a hindrance to the true understanding of literature, and facts are a weak form of literature: reading is a complex process in which observation and the courage of imagination are especially important if we want to use everything the writer offers us. Thus we should get rid of half statements and approximate assessments and enjoy more our own imagination and the purest truth of literature. In the essay “Hours in a Library”, Woolf writes about the pleasure of reading, as well as the difference between reading classical and contemporary writers. She also talks about the profile of the reader, a person who likes to read and who, unlike a learned person who likes to learn, does not search for some truth in the text, but strives for pure and disinterested reading. The best age for reading is between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, meaning, the best reader is young. Older readers tend to write down notes on the text they read, a list of books which they have read or those that should be read, which they flip through from time to time, trying to recall the mood at the time of reading. The young reader is free from such memories, full of self-confidence and a passion for knowledge, and when they go back in time, consult only first-rate writers. The reader is generally less critical and more interested in contemporary writers than in the classics, because, as Woolf says, living voices are still the ones we understand best. Thus, the reader develops a taste even for bad books, and Woolf claims that the contemporary literary period was never less influenced by the authorities, nor more unstable in experiments. Therefore, knowledge of the classics is important, so that we can more easily evaluate contemporary literature, but Woolf appeals for generosity, because writers shape their ideas as best they can. The basic prerequisite for successful literary creation, and to the same extent for proper reading, is to abandon all prejudices, throw away your ego and then, free from all burden, enter into an adventure which might lead anywhere. With their work, the writer should reach the reader’s mind and emotions, encourage them to actively participate in the entire creative process, provide satisfaction, and stimulate both the reader’s body and mind.

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