Elizabeth Abel. Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies

As Clarissa Dalloway walks up Shaftesbury Avenue on that June day when Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes place, she muses on the persistent connections between and among people, the natural world, and everyday objects. ‘Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns,’ the Clarissa-identified stream-of-consciousness narrative describes. ‘It ended in a transcendental theory’ that after death, ‘the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even certain places after death’. With this passage as inspiration, Elizabeth Abel’s Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies explores ‘the odd affinities that constitute [Woolf’s] spectral afterlives: the mist between the branches of her acknowledged genealogies, the ripples beneath the surface of her literary wake’ (p. 1).

In a book both meticulous in its research and careful in its analysis, Abel makes the case that invisible ties bind authors who visibly share little. These bonds traverse historical periods, citizenship, and indexes of identity such as gender, race, and social class. Often, there is little or no biographical evidence to confirm the ‘shadow genealogies’ that Abel traces. And yet, Abel’s argument resonates with the ways in which readers experience connections between disparate authors and the ways in which writers experience particular affinities with those whose writing exists adjacent to their own. Over six chapters, including an introduction, afterword, and four chapters that explore, in turn, affinities between Woolf and Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald, Abel concludes that by attending to ‘partial, minor, unexpected echoes’ in the works that they study, literary critics ‘might find a shadowy genealogy as evanescent as the moths that came to Woolf unbidden on the sounds of Leonard’s gramophone and proceeded to assume unheralded forms across the century’ (p. 226). Ultimately, Abel’s argument provokes a reckoning with the formal and theoretical constitution of twenty-first-century critical discourse and suggests an approach for linking authors and works that initially might seem to emerge from disparate traditions, worldviews, or sensibilities.

In the epigraphs that precede the introduction and in the introductory chapter itself, Abel establishes both the boundaries of her argument and the methods that guide her study. In the gesture of the three framing quotations—one from Woolf’s introduction to Mrs Dalloway, one from Joseph Cuomo’s ‘A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,’ and one from Kabe Wilson’s Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey through 100 Archives—Abel signals her departure from prevailing literary critical methodologies, seeking instead something that grows organically out of Woolf’s writing and opens a pathway towards considering attachments that do not find full evidence in the material sources of history, culture, or biography. Nevertheless, readers can generally understand the book as participating in the project of ‘long modernism,’ tracing the echoes of Woolf from the early part of the twentieth century to its later years. Across that historical sweep, Abel searches for reverberations of Woolf in writing by both men and women, by writers both African-American and European. Abel claims that ‘odd affinities constitute an ambiguous and ambivalent terrain: neither mimicry nor mockery but resonances whose discretion reflects partial and provisional allegiances and whose discernment requires attunement to fine-grained verbal and narrative textures’ (p. 3). Adapting Michel Foucault’s ‘understanding of genealogy as both the practice and the object of an inquiry’, Mikhael Bakhtin’s ‘notion of an “intentional, unconscious” intertextuality’, and Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘conception of a wayward, unpredictable, time-traveling literary resonance that unravels static notions of textual and authorial integrity’, Abel establishes a methodology that values subterranean links that otherwise might go unnoticed, showing that ‘the echoes that disseminate Woolf’s words over time undermine stable categories of genre, period, and national tradition’ while at the same time they ‘advance an alternative conception of dispersed, communal authorship that Woolf embraced overtly toward the end of her career but held dear throughout it’ (p. 3).

Drawing from Woolf’s own ideas, Abel conceives her project as a necessary mediation to reconcile anonymity and subjectivity, and singularity and multiplicity (p. 5). In looking at Larsen and Baldwin, the focus of that mediation is stylistic; as Abel turns to consider Barthes and Sebald, she orients her mediation through psychological concerns and psychoanalytic theory. Abel offers a readable introduction that understands the stakes of its endeavour: to read Woolf not through iconography or public iterations of Woolfian influence but rather through inward itineraries of the reading eye—both hers and those of the authors she studies.

From there, each chapter notably takes a similar form. Abel ties one of Woolf’s novels to one work by the chapter’s author of interest: Chapter 1 pairs Mrs Dalloway with Passing; Chapter 2 pairs Jacob’s Room with Giovanni’s Room; Chapter 3 pairs To the Lighthouse with Camera Lucida; and Chapter 4 pairs Orlando with Austerlitz. Each chapter feels as if it could stand alone as a snapshot of comparison, but taken together, Abel indicates a larger objective: to establish Woolf as an author that especially resonates throughout the decades and across nations. On a micro level, Abel’s book deftly interweaves close reading of primary sources, analysis of autobiographical writing and ephemera, and historical and cultural context into a rich tapestry that allows readers to take in the threads of connection that link Woolf to authors that have heretofore rarely been considered alongside her. Up close, readers participate with Abel in a project of affinity and attachment, uniting disparate strands into a textured portrait of how an author’s writing might reverberate across time and space. The chapter that brings Woolf together with Baldwin most exceptionally illustrates the possibilities of this approach. It begins with a discussion of the aesthetic resonances between Baldwin and Woolf, then moves to discussion of the Giovanni’s Room drafts, and finally moves to a comparative reading of Giovanni’s Room with Jacob’s Room. Abel’s careful study finally leads her and her reader to a new understanding of Baldwin’s work. She explains:

Odd Woolfian affinities continue to leave their subtle yet revealing traces, but the modes and lines of transmission change. Letters, with their individual signatures and addressees, their presumption of language’s communicative power, and their enclosure in envelopes that indicate a legible interiority, yield to more diffuse, fluid, and collective modes of transmission. European philosophical discourses—phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism (to name only the most salient)—also come into play in new ways. In conversation with these discourses, Woolf’s signature tropes assume new forms. The figure of the multichambered house of fiction acquires an increasingly urgent but precarious appeal as a stay against the turbulence of European history. And as the weight of the past signaled by the wind’s final turn in Giovanni’s Room assumes greater complexity and force, the cave of memory that had offered a refuge from the tyranny of time threatens to engulf, haunt, or paralyze—while still offering to enliven—the present (p. 115).

Abel’s sensitive interpretation and thorough integration of source material compel the reader to consider how such odd affinities might reveal themselves in other ways and with other texts.

On a macro level, however, the book raises more questions than it answers. Do Larsen, Baldwin, Barthes, and Sebald share ‘odd affinities’ with each other, too, or is the Woolfian echo contained uniquely within each? Does Abel’s analysis depend on these four authors, or could others replace them with the same result? And there is also a more overarching question about how fully the book accounts for Woolf’s body of work. By focusing most attention on just four of Woolf’s novels, three of which were published between 1922 and 1928, opportunities that her later or less canonical works might have brought to this analysis were missed. Furthermore, by analysing Woolf’s works out of sequence, the book decontextualizes them from Woolf’s own history, concerns, or aesthetic preoccupations. Woolf seems to be used as a cipher through which other authors’ creations might be decoded, but the purpose in doing so is not always clear.

In the end, Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies is a thought-provoking work of criticism that encourages readers to expand their perspectives on modernism, authorship, influence, and national literary traditions. It offers an analysis that is carefully observed, situating its primary sources through close reading, the archive, and a larger theoretical apparatus. Abel’s readings are generous and fully drawn, and she makes a strong case for paying attention to those affinities towards which the greatest writers signal, if only obliquely.