Title: Modern Pilgrimage and the Authority of Space in Forster's A Room with a View and Woolf's the Voyage Out
Abstract: In her essay arrow Bridge of Art, Virginia Woolf outlines new theory of literature; she explicitly compares writing to journey and defines it specifically as kind of secular pilgrimage. She asks, Could [the writer] not sometimes turn round, and shading his eyes in the manner of Robinson Crusoe on the desert island, look into the future and trace on its mist the faint lines of the land which day might reach? (11). Woolf's allusion to Defoe's novel as touchstone in her manifesto for new literary paradigm is striking. Given her sustained interest in the lives of the obscure, may assume that she has little use for canonical writer such as Defoe; Woolf certainly emphasizes the necessity for new forms of literature when, in the same essay, she asserts, some renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands (22). Coincidentally, in his notes for Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster also refers to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which he dismisses as historically important, no doubt, and the parent of other insincerities, [but] I say such writer's bore merely (163-64). Even though Forster deflates Robinson Crusoes's historical significance and is wary of the idea of literary history throughout Aspects of the Novel, he nonetheless famously stresses that we are to visualise the English novelists [ ... ] as seated together in room, circular room, sort of British Museum reading-room--all writing their novels (Aspects 27). I point to this oblique connection to Defoe in both writers' criticism because of Robinson Crusoe's persistent cultural resonance as the ur-text of travel. As they respond to this canonical novel, both Woolf and Forster interrogate the possible relationship between the modernist writer and past narrative. Moreover, their fiction constitutes new kind of travel literature that questions how to read and to write geography and history. In both Woolf and Forster's visions of narrative, the past and present, the here and the there co-exist in mutually informing dialectic. This palimpsestic view of space and history also applies to the ambivalent nature of the modernist relationship to the trope of pilgrimage; for Woolf and Forster, the literary pilgrimage is always Janus-faced, as it simultaneously evokes the past and strives toward innovation. The pilgrimages described in Woolf's The Voyage Out and Forster's A Room with View invoke this apparent contradiction, as these novels illustrate how modernist travel fiction adapts and complicates the pilgrimage trope and the significance of the sacred site. Pilgrimage is persistent preoccupation throughout much of Woolf's and Forster's fiction; however, the early work assigns the young tourist to central position in the narrative, thus providing an ideal arena for studying questions concerning travel and identity. Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, can be seen in many ways as response to Forster's first (first written, although not first published) novel, A Room with View. In both works, the aesthetic and cultural weight placed upon tourism elevates the journey to the status of pilgrimage. Travel becomes quasi-spiritual experience, prefiguring James Buzard's definition of tourism as a quest for meanings (7) and Jonathan Culler's assertion that tourists do set out in quest of the authentic (158). In A Room with View and The Voyage Out, travel embodies search for the essence of experience, as Lucy Honeychurch and Rachel Vinrace, the novels' female protagonists, seek self-discovery through moments of extraordinary experience. These narrative and touristic pilgrimages depend upon the creation of sacred spaces where geographical setting attains new significance through apparently transcendental spiritual experience. Robinson Crusoe's pivotal journey has been variously read as colonization, quest, and an exploration narrative. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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