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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers
ISBN# 9780838641651
Reviewed by: Emily Dalgarno
Virginia Woolf Miscellany |
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This is a wide-ranging book on a difficult and interesting topic, well researched, and written in a readable style. A life-long Lawrence scholar, Stewart devotes three chapters to Lawrence; four are devoted to Byatt, two to Durrell and one each to Cary and Woolf. All five write in "painterly styles that appeal to reader's powers of visualization" that construct a world beyond language (15). Lawrence, in particular his letters and travel books, is seem to link in observations of color and space to painting. yet Stewart aims to go beyond existing studies of the relationship between novelists and painting, to explore such elusive matters as Merleau-Ponty's concept of colors as "different modalities of our co-existence with the world" (15). Stewart constructs his argument on an elaborate system of parallels and similarities, in which texts by painters and art critics, with the occasional reference to a painting, are compared with the work of the five novelists.
What is probably of most interest to Miscellany readers is the opening chapter, on To the Lighthouse. Stewart starts with Roger Fry's observation that the Post-Impressionist movement was not confined to painting. Woolf's stories "Kew Gardens" and "Blue & Green" are a response to Fry, although Woolf later judged them too imitative of painting. Stewart's method is to compare a sentence from Woolf's essay "Walter Sickert": Words are an impure medium...better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint" with another by a Bauhaus artist, Johannes Itten, that "Colors are primordial ideas" (37). Itten's theory of color, that red is active and aggressive, blue "visionary" and associated with passivity and distance, governs the discussion of the Ramsay's marriage. Mr. Ramsay is associated with red and aggressive intellectuality, Mrs. Ramsey with the blue of spiritual vision. Although Stewart writes of "fruitful interactions" between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, his analysis of color tends to immobilize them as points on a spectrum. Located at either end, "Mr. Ramsey's intellectual vision is blocked by infrared rays; at the other Mrs. Ramsay's spiritual vision dissolves in a haze bordering an ultraviolet" (28).
That Woolf invites her reader to see a dimension of narrative and character beyond language is evident throughout her work, in particular in "Time Passes," which is not part of Stewart's argument. Instead he derives that extra dimension from color. In the design of the novel each character is located on an axis. In Part III "on the yellow/violet axis, Carmichael's glow contrasts with Mrs. Ramsay's shadow; on the red/green axis, the passionate warmth of Mr. Ramsay, Tansley, and Rayley contrasts with the coolness of Cam and Lily" (40). The axis leads to a grouping that denies individual difference and to what seems to me a mistaken emphasis on "passionate warmth" in these three male figures. The analysis of color and space invites the reader to "pass beyond the words on the page and to attain 'that luminous silent statis' in which 'esthetic pleasure' merges with human understanding" (41).
The second section of the chapter concerns Part III where "objective space that has fallen into the vortex of raw time and nature is resaturated with subjective duration" (44). Lily uses the virtual space of the canvas to turn inward to her memories of the Ramsays and recompose elements from Part I from the perspective of the painter. Here Stewart compares Lily's aesthetic principles with criticism by Rudolf Arnheim on perspective, Anton Egrenzweig on the creative process, and Merleau-Ponty on the parallels between writing and painting. On the difficult question of aura Stewart turns briefly to Walter Benjamin's definition as "the unique phenomenon of a distance" that links veneration with authenticity (51; see Benjamin 224). The subtext of the chapter concerns the artist's ability to transform unconscious memory and feeling, as though vision constructed a world parallel to that of Proust and Freud, who are scarcely mentioned. Stewart's books helps the reader appreciate that vision is the means by which Woolf together with many of the great Western novelists struggled against intellect to create a world that is barely visible at the horizon of rationality.
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