1“Blue & Green” is a one-page long piece included in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick. Printed in 1921 in Monday or Tuesday it was only reprinted in 1985. It is difficult to identify its literary genre though it has been considered as a short story and also as a prose-poem by a number of critics. As befitted modernism, Virginia Woolf has constantly tried to find forms adapted to her kind of reverie (see Almahameed). Here, under the shape of two paragraphs in the manner of pictorial “pendants,” she conjures up colours much like Signac, for instance, in his neo-impressionist paintings. Actually, Woolf seems to have tried her hand at finding a hybrid poetic cum-narrative form rivalling with colour’s use in painting from which to draw inspiration for those very descriptive lines. From image to text and from images to the reader’s mind, this short short story or “sketch,” seems to be striving for a new/original/unprecedented form triggering the advent of the “pictorial third” I suggested to illustrate the cognitive workings of intermedial reception (see Louvel, Le tiers pictural).
2The short story is a wonderful form fit for a writer’s experimental tests. It is also a means to find one’s specific voice and style. It is often used as a sounding board for innovations later to be implemented in longer forms. And experimenting is what Woolf did during her career as a writer. Susan Dick recalls Woolf’s desire in a letter dated 1908, to “re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes” (Dick 1). This sounds like a manifesto from a writer intent on catching elusive “things” and elaborating “infinite strange shapes” so as to bring them to light thanks to a gossamer-like texture. Which is what Woolf was faithful to, “experiment[ing] throughout her career not only with the novel, but also with various forms of short fiction” (Dick 1). Later on, in 1917, finding the form of the novel “clumsy and overpowering,” Woolf wrote “I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form. Anyhow its very amusing to try with these short things” (qtd. in Dick 1). Inventing “a new form” first thanks to the medium of short story writing also seems to have been what Woolf attempted with “Blue & Green.” A more plastic form able to capture the changes in one’s mind and time, a kind of supple medium for a mind receiving “a myriad impressions” as she advocated in her well-known “manifest/diatribe” against literature such as Arnold Bennett’s, H. G. Wells’s and Galsworthy’s:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Woolf, “Modern Fiction” 106)
3Paying attention to the mind’s fluctuations and everchanging impressions, Woolf tried her hand at concentrating on a particular sense, here that of seeing in the span of a short story. Thus this “story,” “Blue & Green,” is a case in point and an hapax for not only is it short, consisting of two brief paragraphs (twelve lines for Green, ten lines for Blue), but its title does not point to a character or a place or a time or action, but to two colours. Registering the changes of colour then becomes the focus of this strange object by the modernist writer. Its paradox then lies in the fact that it breaks the reading pact in the way called for in “Modern Fiction” (initially published in 1919 and revised in 1925). It only seems to unfold the description of short disjointed scenes registered by a disembodied entity, all the elements of which being introduced by the definite article “the,” as if they were already known. A voice tells the story of the passage from green to blue together with thoughts, elemental story cameos and image associations. Yet, there is more to it than that.
4Blue and Green are associated to day and night, as from green we move on to blue. They serve as the minimal structure of the narrative which follows the passage of time through the perception of the two colours elevated to the role of acting subjects. Originally, the two paragraphs used to “hang” side by side as two pictures forming pendants or a diptych. Each paragraph acts as “un pan,” a stretch or a patch of colour—to follow Georges Didi-Huberman after Proust—, that is, “the almost tactile violence proper to a moment of pure colour” (Didi-Huberman, back cover; my translation). Pure colour is what Woolf is striving to give an equivalent or a transposition of, and for this experiment what is better than the space of a “short thing,” to borrow her words, if not the short story itself?
5Woolf’s time was a period of great artistic, social and scientific developments: after the turn of the century, the 1890s witnessed the elaboration of Freudian psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious, the invention of the cinema, the publication of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses. Consequently, what came to be called “the stream or flow of consciousness” widened the scope of writing about the workings of one’s mind. Woolf kept on trying to find new forms such as a playpoem or a prosepoem. The Waves was her great lyrical work while To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, and Orlando are all experiments in following free random thought one way or another. And so it was with her short stories. John Lehmann hailed the publication of Monday or Tuesday as the beginning of her attempt at fusing prose and poetry, and
from that moment onwards Virginia Woolf was to remain more poet than novelist, forever searching for new means of dissolving prose into poetry, or refining away all but the husk of action in works which still went under the name of novels, and irradiating them with the strange new light. (qtd. in Almahamed 27)
The collection can be read as a very vivid body of disconcerting, strange short stories.
6For Woolf, one of the great esthetic revelations took place in 1910 when she visited the first post-impressionist exhibition in London together with critic, theoretician and friend Roger Fry. She remained bewildered and skeptical in front of the paintings, still linking this esthetic revolution to major social changes and their ethic consequences:
On or about December 1910 human character changed. . . . Relations between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children shifted, . . . and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. (Woolf, “Mr. Bennett” 320)
- 1 See also Townsend.
- 2 Actually, there are seven apples and not six in Keynes’s painting.
She was still vexed visiting the second post-impressionist exhibition in December 1912 at the Grafton Galleries, curated by Roger Fry and Desmond McCarthy and dedicated to Matisse’s work. She mocked at “the furious excitement of these people (the artists) all winter over their pieces of canvas coloured green and blue, [as] odious” (letter to Violet Dickinson, 24 Dec. 1912, Letters II 15).1 Yet her sister Vanessa was a painter married to critic Clive Bell and later intimate with Duncan Grant. Woolf was a close friend of these members of the Bloomsbury group and she was profoundly attracted to painting although she saw it as inferior to writing. Their portraits of the artist testify to their close relationship. In 1918, Woolf had the opportunity of gazing at leisure at Maynard Keynes’s small Still life by Cézanne Keynes had bought from the Degas collection and which was first kept at Vanessa’s then at Roger Fry’s place. Mesmerized by the painting, and trying to understand why it was so fascinating, Woolf was asking herself “What can 6 apples not be?” (Woolf, Diary I 140).2 What Roger Fry and Clive Bell called “the significant form” insisted on the formal importance of the work, on the overall importance of the pictorial matter, composition, colour, rhythm of the painting. In her own introduction to Vanessa Bell’s exhibition, Woolf, in her turn, eventually acknowledged the import of the materiality of painting and praised silence as its main characteristic, contrasting it with language and literature, revivifying the arguments of the paragone.
No stories are told; no insinuations are made. The hill side is bare; the group of women is silent; the little boy stands in the sea saying nothing. If portraits they are, they are pictures of flesh which happens from its texture or its modelling to be aesthetically on an equality with the China pot or the chrysanthemum. (Woolf, “Recent Paintings” 171)
This passage also remarks on the painter’s reticence, walled in the silence of her medium:
But Mrs Bell says nothing. Mrs Bell is as silent as the grave. Her pictures do not betray her. Their reticence is inviolable . . . Her vision excites a strange emotion and yet when we have dramatized it or poeticized it or translated it into all the blues and greens, and fines and exquisites and subtles of our vocabulary, the picture itself escapes. It goes on saying something of its own. (“Recent Paintings” 172, my emphasis)
The picture keeps escaping all the blues and greens the writer is trying to catch.
7Woolf tried to find a kind of literary equivalent of the post-impressionist and abstract revolution importing into her texts some of its pictorial formal principles. Conscious of the difficulties of what is now called “transmediation,” that is the transposition of form from one medium to another and not only of a subject matter, she nevertheless affirmed that “all great writers are great colourists” (“Walter Sickert” 241) and acknowledged that when reading poetry “the colour sense is first touched: roused” (Reading Notebooks 13). Woolf’s work is bathed in a blue and green light, her favourite colours, until in her hybrid last work, Between the Acts, she writes: “Blue and Green’s the day” (124).
8In his study of Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound (1914) kept in Tate Britain, Christopher Townsend acknowledges “the significant changes that occur in Woolf’s Prose around 1917-19 [which] are first manifested in the short stories ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917) and ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919)” under the influence of Grant’s collages. He argues Woolf was struck by Grant’s paradigms that echoed her own precepts such as “a model of abstract, coloured forms in motion.” Finding an adequate shape to accommodate painting in her own medium, she chose the shorter form to renew narration, choosing fragmented splintered points of view while giving up smooth story-telling as in “Monday or Tuesday,” the eponymous story. Transposing in her texts the modernist and cubist uses of colour and their structuring geometric abstract principles, Woolf decided to go beyond a border and invade the painter’s domain. The two colours associated to Cézanne, which she had contemplated for a long time and found so mysterious, turned out to be the subject of a poïetic answer to this challenge. Thus she tried to “render” the impression of pure colour with her words and sentences.
9Townsend also acknowledges that “[i]f writing and painting are ultimately different, there remain possibilities for exchanges between the two that occur as much on a conceptual as a formal level.” He makes a convincing statement that one of the significant influences on Woolf’s work may have been Grant’s, both an abstract and a kinetic painter. He furthermore quotes Christopher Gray’s observation that “[t]he affinity between the painting and the poetry of the Cubist movement does not lie in a common technical means . . . but rather in a common set of ideas about aesthetic problems” (Gray, qtd. in Townsend). I will argue that “Blue & Green” precisely does so too, but not only that.
10The title of a piece of fiction belonging to a narrative genre—tale, novel, short story—usually works as a banner indicating what the text is going to be about. It is also meant to intrigue a reader inciting her or him to read beyond it. The title here is puzzling: two colours will carry the day, and colour can only exist thanks to an object and light, as Woolf asserted in Orlando:
and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked . . . at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath his window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each. (11, my emphasis)
- 3 In contemporary editions, the two paragraphs are printed one on top of the other which is not in k (...)
11“Blue” & “Green,” as in a diptych, face one another in the original edition by the Hogarth Press, fragmenting the contemporary printed page into two one-page paragraphs. The shape of the two panels of a diptych was respected with Blue on the right page and Green on the left one (see Almahameed 27-28). The two colour names and their paragraphs thus inverted the order of the title, perhaps mimicking a kind of possibility for the pages to fold back one onto the other?3
12The two paragraphs are disposed like narrative prose yet without a true narrative taking place. They are autonomous as a pendant painting is, offering a variant of its neighbour (man and wife for instance). Their form, the strong concentration of rhetoric and stylistic devices, with parataxis, personification, anaphora, together with the use of rhythms, images, metaphors and alliterations, are in keeping with the tightly knit techniques of short story and poetry writing.
13Woolf wrote short experimental pieces, short short stories, essays and often opaque plays, “sketches” like “A Sketch of the Past.” She wrote about her quest for a shape fit for her experiments:
the little pieces in Monday or Tuesday were written by way of diversion . . . they were the little treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style . . . that again in one second. Showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it. (qtd. in Lee 376)
For Hermione Lee “the little sketches that kept pace with Jacob’s Room, like ‘The String Quartet’ or ‘Monday or Tuesday’ [were] intense, free-floating word pictures” (436, my emphasis). Furthermore those “word pictures” were published together with wood engravings by Vanessa.
14The two paragraphs are mostly descriptive. The tense is the present, suggesting fixity as in a painting. We are close to an ekphrasis without it being formally identified as such. After the first enigmatic reading, the text offers itself as its pictorial equivalent which suggests the passage of time thanks to the light variations: “all day long,” “evening comes,” “it’s night,” “one day” (“Blue & Green” 136). It is akin to an imagist or a cubist poem with its juxtaposition of often verbless syntactical segments which gives rise to quick short images conjured up by colour, as if one were in a dreamlike state induced by colour. Yet this reverie also goes together with light changes and colour iridescence.
15Each colour has its own characteristics: “The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble” (136). Green are the parrots’ feathers, the sharp blades of palm trees, green the needles glittering in the sun. The hard cold light metamorphoses into drips and makes “pools [which] hover above the desert sand; the camels lurch through them” (136). A mirage (almost the anagram of image) is suggested as well as exoticism and an orientalist dream. Warmth is opposed to the coolness of green. A mirage reveals an unfocused mind or a wavering sight-seeing, a hallucination, an illusion. Indirection, allusion and the implicit are the narrative choices that prevail in the story.
16Here is an unprecedented form, that of a diptych transmediated into prose. The punctuation markedly mars the text with dashes, semi colons, full stops. The narrative is broken up into a succession of quickly appearing unrelated images. Green is associated with sharp visual elements: “pointed fingers of glass,” “the ten fingers of the lustre,” close to sharp sounds—“harsh cries”—, together with long sounding sounds—“sharp blades of palm trees”—, and plosives: “the hard glass drips on the marble.” The movement is downward: “hang downwards,” “slides down,” “drops,” “drips,” counterbalanced by a few horizontal notations: “the pools,” “the desert,” “the shadows sweep the green over the mantelpiece” (136). Of note, the alliterations and assonances which accentuate the broken jarring quality of the sentences.
17When evening comes and shadows have chased green from the mantelpiece, the sea becomes rough and a void ensues: “No ships come, the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky” (my emphases). Then “[t]he needles drip blots of blue. The green’s out” (136). The /d/ and /b/ sounds strike the sentence before green disappears. No more light, and blue appears. “Blue” will be repeated eight times in the ten-line text and once in the preceding paragraph. “Green” itself is repeated six times in twelve lines, which imparts the text with a musical rhythm like a recurring chorus.
18In an upward movement the sea monster reaches the surface, sending waterspouts before laying its defeated body on the beach. The atmosphere is marine. This time water drops as as many blue beads and “strokes of blue line his back” (136). Blue tints everything and everything is engulfed in a wave of blue; a wrecked rowing boat; the bells turn blue with sound (evoking bluebells), bringing up a poetic synesthesia. In front of this blue-tinted landscape stands, introduced by the adversative “but,” the cold “different” man-made cathedral, “incense laden and faint blue with the veils of madonnas” (136). Colour is the main active agent thanks to the rare verbs of action: to line, to close over, to dowse, to stain. And kaleidoscope-like, it builds up an oneiric atmosphere. Everything is bathed in blue, with only one qualifier: the “faint” blue of the madonnas’ veils.
19If colour has become a subject here, it is only an idea of colour, without nuances or any attempt at grounding it more precisely. It is an abstract blue similar to Lily Briscoe’s own geometric finishing touch, a last stroke completing her cubist-like painting at the end of To the Lighthouse:
There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. . . . With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (237)
20Green, which reigns during the day (a primary colour mixing yellow and blue, a mixture of warm and cold colour), has given way to blue (a cold colour) in the evening and coming night. The story tells of a day span, of its changing light—in a nutshell, it is a story about the path of the sun, water and a sea-shore. Woolf’s inspiration has constantly linked her to the sea and its shore, ever since her childhood impressions of the family stay in St Ives. In The Waves, a sea monster figures too, a dolphin is visible surfacing thanks to its “fin in the waste of water” before plunging deep in the depths of silence, “like a fin in the wastes of silence” (184). “The fin” smoothly transfers from water to silence, abstracting itself in a metaphor. The apparition punctuates the novel with its metaphysical presence, that of a long-awaited event in front of solitude and death, the last words being an invocation—“O Death!” (192).
21No colour without light. The “sketch” ends in the chiaroscuro of an in-between piece of writing. Woolf manages to create a mysterious atmosphere enveloping her reader in a green and blue succession of broken up visions, casting a coloured shadow on an abstract cloud of words lost in a dreamlike atmosphere.
22Is it possible to evoke “coloured abstraction” for this double sketch in prose as a new form laden with the author’s own obsessive themes (water, the sea, pointed shapes, death)? In these paragraphs no human being is seen, no thoughts or comments figure, the choice is that of impersonality and fragmentation. The focalizer records the scene and its changes, takes note of them in a detached tone. Few assessments are made: “but,” “snub-nosed,” “fiery-white.” Little interpretation betrays a presence: “heavy with water,” “blue stains,” “Blue are the ribs,” “harsh cries” (136). Who decides? Who sees? Who is behind the writing? Someone who chooses to recoil in the background and give pride of place to things. One may remember “Solid Objects,” another fine metaphysical short story of Woolf’s, dedicated to inanimate objects.
- 4 “Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chos (...)
23Colour has gained autonomy as if freed from its incarnation, abstracted from its object, suggesting the emancipation of the narrative from its representational coating, as advocated in “Modern Fiction.” Colour, and none other, is the agent of motion here, as in Duncan Grant’s Kinetic Collage. To quote Jacques Le Rider, colours themselves “being abstracted from any objectivity, are the mainspring, the subject of the painting” (43, my translation). For neo-impressionnists like Signac or for cubist or abstract painters like Grant, Delaunay, Picasso or Braque, colour and shape are sufficient. One may think of Mallarmé’s famous “l’absente de tous bouquets”4 which can be adapted here as “l’abstraite de tous bouquets,” the only flower alluded to here being the bluebell. For Kandinsky, colour is autonomous, which is in keeping with the modernist project. For Maurice Blanchot the repetition of the colour name verges on an incantation, and it makes “‘things present outside of themselves’ outside of their representation” (qtd. in Le Rider 45, my translation). This is a paradox, for colour requires an object and a light or a prop (canvas, wall, screen) to be seen. Le Rider notes that “modern writing wants to be sensual and visual, it seeks pure expressivity and to capture the emotional power of colours, just like painting” (43, my translation).
- 5 A pun on the famous “sister arts,” which designate literature and painting. See Gillespie’s study (...)
24Woolf’s writing does away with emotion and storytelling, giving way to minute observations and sensitivity, to the importance of the visual marked by the impersonality that characterises modernism. Proof of the difficulty of the challenge, striving to innovate and find a new literary form, Woolf engages in a hybrid experience and comes up with what she will call “a mystic playpoem” for The Waves, a “Novel-Essay” for The Pargiters—which will become The Years. Woolf tries to find in the sister art (or sister’s art)5 a way of renewing the short story form in-between poetry and prose, abstraction and the visual arts—namely post-impressionism, futurism and cubism. Colour then becomes synonymous with motion. It is no longer a colour subjected to a narrative or images which imitate reality, but the main medium of a short word-picture story. The green or blue stretches (pans) become narrative agents. The text ends reaching out to the boundaries of canonical art history with the evocation of the “faint blue . . . veils of madonnas” (136). What other form than a pictorial short story could have managed this feat? And in these last words, the ultimate mother (madonna) is at last recovered after mourning her loss on the beach, announcing To the Lighthouse, still to be written (1927). In a sublime image, the visual experience of the short-story-as-painting collapses.
25Colour in literature is the locus of complex stakes: it is the place of the oscillation between subjectivity and objectivity. Can we speak of ekphrasis about this text? At least it is one split up in the form of a dipytch, a conventional pictorial item combined with innovative artistic experiments. There is no description of a painting as such except for that suggested in the very last words. Ekphrasis, in its original meaning means “to put under one’s eyes,” “to make to see.” It marks the limits of each art, and of their intermedial comparison, revealing the aesthetic and ethic choices of the period and of its norms.
- 6 James Heffernan talks of “obstetric ekphrasis” (5). I prefer “Maieutic ekphrasis,” which is more p (...)
26Woolf, aiming at hybrid forms, envisaged reconciled relationships between the arts unlike the more antagonistic paragone. She saw their companionship as “the sunny margin where the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments” (“Walter Sickert” 243), which reflects her Bloomsbury and Charleston experience. “Maieutic ekphrasis”6 gives birth to a potential narrative as if it was enclosed in the “painting-effect,” “l’effet-tableau” (Louvel, “Disputes intermédiales”). The story indirectly suggests that visual art is also the story of the advent of a literary shape. Narrativised colour, even if it saturates the text, if its name is endlessly repeated, even if it suggests a kind of green then a blue cloud, is confronted to the sign opacity which lies under the phenomenological experience (this is what Mallarmé alluded to). Still, something remains—as the foot glimpsed under the chaos of colour in another short story, Balzac’s Le chef d’œuvre inconnu. For in the spectator’s inner eye, the “pictorial third” (Louvel, Le tiers pictural) arises as a result of a “reading event” (Marin). It is close to the after-effect of a painting leaving its coloured trace in our mind’s eye. Its strong imprint is only possible thanks to the short form, its condensed powerful impact left on our mind’s eye. The flicker of a painting, a coloured atmosphere, the experience of it when contemplating a seashore and dreaming it, condensed in a poetic pictorial short story.
