Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room. Grafton books, 1976; first published by the Hogarth Press 1922.

Jacob’s Room was published in that momentous year for modernist literature (and art), 1922 – the year that saw ‘The Waste Land’ and Ulysses appear. Like those innovative, experimental works that broke free of conventional literary forms and conventions, Woolf’s novel eschews traditional omniscient third-person narrative form, with its linear, chronological sequence of linked incidents that reveal character.

That means there’s also no plot to speak of. There’s a sequence of  scenes vignettes in which characters interact, converse, or else there’s just description of setting. It’s not always possible to discern any connection between these snapshot-like segments. As a technique I suppose it can be likened to the technique of some impressionist and post-impressionist painters.

We don’t even learn very much about the character in the title. We first see Jacob Flanders as a small boy with his mother and siblings on holiday on a Cornish beach. In the first of many ominous images of death, he repels his mother by showing her a trophy he had found in the sand: the skull of a sheep. Here’s what Woolf says about it:

Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust – No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs Flanders.

It’s surely not a spoiler to indicate that Jacob is one of the doomed generation of young men who were slaughtered on the fields of Flanders – Jacob’s surname is no accident – and elsewhere during World War I. There’s no plot, as I suggested, to spoil. It’s one of the great acts of subversion in this beautiful, difficult novel, to depict a hero who displays no heroic characteristics. In fact, we see very little of anything remarkable about Jacob. He’s shown at school, then at Cambridge and later as a young man attending social events in fashionable London and conducting a sort of love affair with an art student, Florinda.

Almost everything we know about him, which isn’t very much, is hinted at through the perceptions and comments of the characters who populate these scenes. Some of them recur, but many flit into the narrative light only once, then disappear, like spectres. There’s something sort of incorporeal about Jacob as a consequence. He’s a kind of ghostly figure before his inevitable fate in Flanders, or wherever in battle he ends his short, unremarkable life.

The hints are present in that extract I just quoted. There may be some distant echoes of the war poets and novelists there: those mentions of ‘powder’ and ‘dust’. Why else would the skull bone be referred to as ‘unpolluted’, when so many of the writers and artists who depicted the hell of that war portrayed the white bones half buried in the mud – rat’s alley, as Eliot called it, where the dead men lost their bones.

The disjointedness of the prose, too, mimics the modernist attempt to convey the inability of conventional novelistic style to capture the ruin, decay and fragmentation – the effects of high explosives and machine-gun fire that cut down so many of those doomed young men. The way that paragraph veers abruptly away from the rather gruesomely poetic description of the skull and shifts into speculation about what would become of it in an imagined future, to the non sequitur of Betty Flanders’ thoughts about lodgings, indicates the technique Woolf and other modernist artists were introducing. Such rough juxtapositions and interruptions/disruptions were to be seen shortly after this period in the collage techniques of early film makers like Eisenstein. Life isn’t neatly ordered and sequential in real life, and it’s not as if that technique appeared out of the blue: Henry James and others had been experimenting with similar narrative disruptions for some time before this.

This is becoming too nebulous. Let’s end with a piece that just caught my eye as I looked at the novel again. First we get one of the instances of what others think of Jacob. This is Clara, who appears to be in love with him, though, like Prufrock, she doesn’t dare disturb the universe by showing it:

‘I like Jacob Flanders,’ wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. ‘He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him, though he’s frightening because…’ But Mr Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women!

Woolf can be beautifully funny but also, as here, spiky and wittily teasing and toying. Soon after the narrative continues:

But then this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t. [We’re then told that Jacob was telling an indecent joke about a walking tour he’d recently made – another of those incongruous juxtapositions.]

Woolf delights in these unexpected tonal collisions. They delight this reader, too. Then, soon after, the prose turns more serious and sombre: we’re told that a man who admires Jacob’s mother considered Jacob his favourite of her children:

It seems that a profound, impartial and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us – why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

This is all haunting, elegiac and beautiful, and very sad. How can we know anything with any certainty? Even the title of this novel is about a vacant space, not the person to whom it belongs.

I can’t finish without mentioning the final page: it’s one of the most poignant and beautiful endings to a novel I can think of.

After reading this I went on to Hemingway’s Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises. It could hardly be more different in style, content and tone, yet it’s also a novel haunted by the recently ended war and the lost generation that followed Jacob’s. More about that next time.

Meanwhile I’d recommend you take a look at the thoughtful and perceptive post on Jacob’s Room by Max at Pechorin’s Journal blog HERE, and another by Tony at Tony’s Reading List HERE.