Dreaming, History and the Visions of the Obscure in The Years

Abstract

Woolf’s experimentation with representing the past and her engagement with historical narrative becomes more conspicuous, because it takes a more ‘realistic’ form in The Years, the last novel to be published in her lifetime, crucially, at the dawn of the Second World War, in 1937.² In this ostentatiously historical novel, dates, facts and material details prevail, in contrast to The Waves, a modernist achievement of poetic suggestiveness and narrative fluidity, which immediately preceded it, or the surreal imagination and satire of Orlando, her first historiographical narrative. Woolf’s apparent turn to literary naturalism may seem all the more paradoxical considering that, as we saw in Chapter 4, she had famously castigated the ‘materialist’ verisimilitude which permeated the fiction of the ‘Edwardian’ writers in her essays ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in 1924 and earlier still in ‘Modern Novels’(1919), a slightly different version of ‘Modern Fiction’. In all these essays, Woolf accuses the Edwardian novelists, and in particular Mr Wells, Mr Galsworthy and Mr Bennett, for claiming to depict real life, the subject of the novel, purely with reference to ‘facts’, the external environment, manners and material details, instead of looking within, at how the minds of real people registers life.³

[The] task is reserved for a science of history whose subject matter is not a tangle of purely factual details, but consists rather of the numbered group of threads that represent the weft of the past as it feeds into the warp of the present. […] The subject matter of history, once released from pure facticity, needs no appreciation. For it offers not vague analogies to the present, but constitutes the precise dialectical problem that the present is called upon to resolve.

(W. Benjamin)¹