IVWS Panel “Street-Life: Woolf and Public Spaces,” MLA 2006

“I Salute Thee; Passing”:

Generic Hybridity and Urban Space in Woolf’s “Ode Written Partly in Prose”

Adam Hammond, University of Toronto

While Woolf’s “The Narrow Bridge of Art” is by no means alone in discussing the problem of modernity in relation to that of public space, it is decidedly peculiar in subordinating its analysis of both to questions of genre. The 1927 essay defines modernity by an “attitude” — one of contrast, discord, and incongruity — to which it assigns a very specific cause: “the failure of poetry” (218). To complete the causal chain, it explains this generic failure by proposing a walk through a city street: “[t]he long avenue of brick is cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof” (222).

Where Walter Benjamin emphasizes the impetus to separate public from private space in the nineteenth century, what interests Woolf in the twentieth century are the generic consequences of the fact that the distinction no longer holds. The paradox of proximity by which residents are brought into increasingly alienated concentration and in which the jealously guarded vestiges of personal space are permeated on all sides by the technologies of communication leads, in Woolf’s analysis, to a crisis of genre. If poetry had once been adequate to the representation of the private and the personal and prose to the public and the interpersonal, neither is able independently to capture “the quick and queer emotions which are bred in small separate rooms” (223). Recognizing the problem of modernity as an effect of genre, however, “The Narrow Bridge of Art” proposes also to resolve it through genre: with a poetic prose that would capture in its hybridity the sneer and contrast of an age whose boundaries of public and private have been pushed to obsolescence.

While much of Woolf’s corpus can be regarded as venturing toward such poetic prose, there is perhaps no more conspicuous example of her generic hybridity than the “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville," written in 1934 and never published. Woolf’s only “poem” offers an extremely self-conscious — and self-consciously poetic — account of the life of a butcher, presenting the “prose” spaces of John Cutbush (Pentonville, the shop, the high street, the public fair) through the “poetic” lyric voice of an itinerant narrator markedly higher in class. While the few extant readings of the “Ode” present it as classist and ironic, I propose that it can more productively be regarded as an ambivalent but earnest investigation of the problem of representing urban space. While its emphatically mixed genre, its lyric renderings of public spaces, and its novelistic narrative of emotional life suggest a deliberate attempt at instantiating the prescriptions of “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” the “Ode” ends by rejecting generic aims of capturing, redeeming, or stably expressing the spatial confusions of the modern city. As its concluding line, “I salute thee; passing,” suggests, the “Ode” celebrates the aesthetic and political possibilities opened up in the hybrid spaces of urban modernity precisely by refusing to master them.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of 1935>.” The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. 3-13.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. Vol. 2. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966-69. 218-229.

————. “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonvile.” A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Vintage, 2003. 231-235.