Granit ve Gökkuşağı

by Virginia Woolf, İlknur Güzel (Translator)

Virginia Woolf yaşamı boyunca makalelerinden oluşan iki kitap yayımladı.
Granit ve Gökkuşağı, bu kitaplarda yer almayan makalelerin, yazarın ölümünden sonra bir araya gelmesiyle oluştu. Eşi Leonard Woolf kitabın editörlüğünü üstlendi ve titiz bir çalışma sonucunda makaleleri topladı.
Granit ve Gökkuşağı’ndaki makaleler iki ana başlık altında toplandı. Birinci bölümü yazarın edebiyat ve roman sanatı üzerine yazıları, ikinci bölümü ise “biyografi” üzerine çalıştığı yazılar oluşturdu. Romancı olmasının yanı sıra, İngiliz edebiyatının gelmiş geçmiş en önemli edebiyat eleştirmenlerinden de biri olan Woolf; Hemingway’den Henry James’e, Katherine Mansfield’den Coleridge’e uzanan geniş bir yelpazede edebiyat ve biyografi üzerine görüşlerini cesurca bir tutkuyla dile getiriyor.

“O güzel akıl! İşte bu! Berrak, tutkulu, bağımsız, keskin, gururlu ve biteviye beslenen, saygıdeğer nedenlerle alışılmadık, her tür nedenle hassas ve bizi sonsuza dek etkiledi…”
New York Times Book Review

“Virginia Woolf, seçkin bir romancı ve aynı zamanda aşılması zor bir eleştirmen. Bu yeni eleştiri yazılarıyla Virginia Woolf’un; George Eliot’tan bu yana, kadınlığı olmazsa olmaz yaparak kalemi eline alan ve yazmaya başlayan en harikulade zekâ olup olmadığı sorusu aklımızı kurcalıyor…”
San Francisco Chronicle

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Classics, Collections, British Literature, Writing, Literature

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
This is a posthumous collection of essays by Woolf ranging from about 1908 to the late 1930s, but mostly in the 1920s. As the blurb says the essays are on the art of fiction and the art of biography. Leonard Woolf collected together many essays and reportage in three volumes published in the years after Woolf’s death. This one came along in the late 1950s as a result of extensive research by two Woolf scholars in the US. Woolf usually did not keep copies of the articles she wrote and they were often published anonymously.
The title “Granite and Rainbow” comes from an essay entitled The New Biography. Woolf talks about the tension between the “granite-like solidity” of historical facts and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of the human personality and the weaving of these two things into a whole. She uses the necessity of doing this to illustrate the tedious and boring nature of Victorian biography and neatly dissects the book she is reviewing; a biography of Edward VII by Sidney Lee (one rating on GR) comparing it with Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Woolf comes back to this approach to biography a number of times in this collection.
I suppose the best known essay in this book concerns Hemmingway and is eminently quotable. She reviews his collection of short stories Men Without Women and also analyses The Sun Also Rises. The comment she makes about the short stories is classic Woolf; “There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again” (she doesn’t say how much longer). She thought Hemmingway’s characters talked too much; but her real criticism is that Hemmingway “lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter's cloak, get between him and the fact …. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns - call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like - pass him close each time”. As to the characterisation, comparing him to Chekov the characters are “flat as cardboard”. The whole is a delight to read.
All the essays are well written as you would expect; this is a different Woolf to her fiction, this is her bread and butter and how she survived for many years. Some of the books reviewed are not well known now, some still known. The longest piece in the book is “Phases of Fiction” and covers novelists and poets like Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen, the Brontes, Stephenson, assorted poets and goes as far as Proust; to name but a few. It is an interesting run through mostly English fiction and Woolf’s judgements are always pertinent and sometimes unexpected. This collection takes its place alongside The Common Reader and the other collections published after Woolf’s death; it contains some interesting reflections on the art of writing and reviewing.

[merixien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf’un ölümünden sonra, eşi Leonard Woolf editörlüğünde yayınlanan makalelerinden oluşuyor. Kitap kurgu, edebiyat ve biyografi üzerine, bu konulardaki temel taşları üzerinden fikirlerini taşırken, bir yandan da yazarın kendi yazım yolculuğuna ve düşünce yapısına dair çok güzel detaylar veriyor. Granit ve Gökkuşağı ile Woolf’un daha önceden okuduğum kitaplarından çok daha farklı bir haliyle de tanışmış oldum.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

You could read Woolf and be encouraged by her language, style, and story, but once you read A Writer's Diary, there's something incredibly awe-inspiring not only about her oeuvre, but about those thoughts and moments of clarity and insecurity she had with each book, moments balled up into one ramble of genius. So when reading this nonfiction piece, Granite and Rainbow, it was rather bemusing to consider how tormented she was at literary criticism of her novels, and yet how great she was at being a critic of other novels. Tough job it seems, to evaluate the work of peers. Imagine how many friendships could be lost. At least Woolf knew what she was doing, at least she paid careful attention to the craft (unlike the brutal rush of emotion we often see buried on the internet that sometimes ruin the work of artists).

My favorites in this collection were the criticism. These thoughts of hers resonated:

No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like more miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and concceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics' decrees.

In "An Essay in Criticism," she probes the "great French masters, Merimee and Maupassant,"talks about the "Tchekov method" where stories "move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away" (maybe this is why teaching his stories was always a beautiful classroom experience for me). She examines Hemingway's work and writing style like a student examines her lab experiment. And in "Phases of Fiction," a longer piece that could stand alone, she eruditely traverses numerous authors, books, and periods, producing a lecture on the appetite, history, and emotion of fiction, all while dissecting the authors of these works. She goes on and on, observing pivotal pieces, giving reading nourishment to those wanting more from literature. It was an adventurous book to tackle at this stage of my reading catchup, but I'm glad I did.

[Samuel Maina · Rating 4 out of 5]

HOURS IN A LIBRARY
I have come to the conclusion that the books you read in your formative years have a very huge bearing on the books you read in the future. That said, there seems to be a very big difference between the man of learning and the man of reading.
In my opinion it is better to be a man of learning than a man of reading. I realised this a while ago and narrowed down my reading to learning….meaning I could now focus on specific Authors and topics. It is rewarding!
The classics need to be read…..and re-read slowly to be fully understood…….at least the gave quality before the commercial bug and “arm chair critics” came to the front. Virginia agrees…… “New books may be more stimulating and in some ways more suggestive than the old, but they do not give us that absolute certainty of delight which breathes through us when we come back again to Comus, or Lycidas, Urn Burial, or Antony and Cleopatra.”
THE NARROW BRIDGE OF ART
It seems unfair that Virginia would bash the prose writers and heap praise for the Poets. Maybe I am the one that did not understand but is seems like she was on a mission to point guys back to the reading of poems.
The struggle with democracy of prose....cannot allow one to express some ideas that can only be expressed by the metre or is it canto.
IMPASSIONED PROSE
Wow! This is a story about prose writing. While prose and poetry can never and should never compete, I feel like Virginia did a solid differentiation between writing normal prose and deep prose. It is also very clear that the passion was De Quicey’s long before he started eating opium
There is a very thin line as nothing is more reprehensible than a prose writer to write like a poet. I know for one Virginia experimented with this style. Prose readers do not fully appreciate the depth of poetry, and when encompassed in prose they seem lost like Dorothy when reading. De Quincey seems to have negated the notion – “those who would wish to see a great many more things said in prose than are now thought proper, we live under the rule of the novelists.”
Here is what makes fiction walk with a limping leg – “The whole tendency therefore of fiction is against prose poetry.” “They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other; while prose itself, so long in service to this drastic master, has suffered the same deformity, and will be fit, after another hundred years of such discipline, to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.”
De Quincey the inventor of “modes of impassioned prose” which is a tough faculty –
“A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self-sufficiency of poetry.” Striking that balance is no ordinary feat.
This felt to me like a short biography of De Quincey. Definitely going to dig him out…

LIFE AND THE NOVELIST
Alright – this is about the relation of the novelist to life and what it should be. The danger is being exposed to life. The solution is to withdraw yourself…. into some solitary room where, with toil and pause, in agony (like Flaubert), with struggle and rush, tumultuously (like Dostoevsky) they have mastered their perceptions, hardened them, and changed them into the fabrics of their art. A solitary life for the novelist allows them to view life from a different angle and that makes for good writing. Too much withdrawal is not good as well…”To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze. His state then is a precarious one. He must expose himself to life; he must risk the danger of being led away and tricked by her deceitfulness; he must seize her treasure from her and let her trash run to waste. But at a certain moment he must leave the company and withdraw, alone, to that mysterious room where his body is hardened and fashioned into permanence by processes which, if they elude the critic, hold for him so profound a fascination.”

ON REREADING MEREDITH
The opinions about Meredith are wide and varied. It impresses me that this is among the towering British writers seeing as he is being compared to the Russians….has his dwelling in, the very heart of the emotions. “The Russians might well overcome us, for they seemed to possess an entirely new conception of the novel and one that was larger, saner, and much more profound than ours. It was one that allowed human life in all its width and depth, with every shade of feeling and subtlety of thought, to flow into their pages without the distortion of personal eccentricity or mannerism.”
Truth -”Meredith takes truth by storm; he takes it with a phrase, and his best phrases are not mere phrases but are compact of many different observations, fused into one and flashed out in a line of brilliant light. It is by such phrases that we get to know his characters.”
To state that “Meredith was the undisputed equal of the greatest of poets. 'No man has ever been endowed with richer gifts.' He was the possessor of 'in some ways the most consummate intellect that has ever been devoted to literature….” Is pointing us towards the light.
Apart from the trappings of nobleness ingrained in him, “No modern writer, for example, has so completely ignored the colloquial turns of speech and cast his dialogue in sentences that could without impropriety have been spoken by Queen Elizabeth in person………… His English power of imagination, with its immense audacity and fertility, his superb mastery of the great emotions of courage and love, his power of summoning nature into sympathy with man and of merging him in her vastness, his glory in all fine living and thinking—these are the qualities that give his conceptions their size and universality.”

THE ANATOMY OF FICTION
I will not go to comment of what Prof. Hamilton and or Virginia Woolf were tussling about. I just want to admit that in as much as a frog had many parts……dissecting it and removing the different bits is gross. The uniform picture of the joint whole plus the illuminating colors on the frog’s skin makes an appeal. The approach to deducing fiction although different from many quarters should all point us to the beautiful scene. The combined whole should point us to the big picture.

GOTHIC ROMANCE
Can we possibly say that Henry James was a Goth? Well what is Gothic romace – For one I can state that is is romance belonging to the middle ages. Back then, it was different from now. The most “acclaimed” writers were sitting pretty on the shelves while we had more superior writers siting out in the cold.
Virginia brings a very poignant point here by contrasting what used to happen back the in the middle ages:
“The books that formed part of the ordinary library in the year 1764 were, presumably, Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, Gray's Poems, Richardson's Clarissa, Addison's Cato, Pope's Essay on Man. No one could wish for a more distinguished company.”
“….literary critics are too little aware, a love of literature is often roused and for the first years nourished not by the good books, but by the bad.”
“….we need not be surprised to find a school of writers grown up in flat defiance of the prevailing masters. Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mrs. Radcliffe all turned their backs upon their time and plunged into the delightful obscurity of the Middle Ages, which were so much richer than the eighteenth century in castles, barons, moats, and murders.”
There seemed to exist an underground culture of writers who were so good at what they were doing outside the mainstream writers. I wish we can get back to this in our current age. All writers want to be best sellers. We have commercialized this thing….of reading….not for knowledge or art sake.

SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION
Ladies and gentlemen, please read Henry James and also try Isaac Asimov while at it.

HENRY JAMES’S GHOST STORIES
When we say that Henry James had a passion for story-telling we mean that when his significant moment came to him the accessories were ready to flock in. I choose not to look at it in terms of art but sure enough it is a skill that not many people have.
We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.

A TERRIBLY SENSITIVE MIND
I NOW UNDERSTAND WHU Katherine Mansfield is rated a top notch writer of short stories. Most impressions seem to be found In her diaries. Her attitude towards her work admirable, sane, caustic and austere. Not alluding to her own success as a writer even when she was well aware of it. Wow!
AN ESSAY IN CRITICISM
It is easy to become a critic. The world we live in has so many critic who are so shallow the writers or authors wonder what they are speaking about when critiquing their works.
It is the work of a writer to make sure the depth of their works can be interpreted to infinity. There you give no room for the said critics. Nowadays, people rely of reviews by critics before reading a book. A shame that even fewer people now read when compared to previous centuries where we had not many books. I am not saying there are not good critics out there, I am just saying that it is easy to become a critic without fully understanding what it takes to be an author.
In my opinion, the best critic is an author. Better yet if they critique a genre they subscribe to.

PHASES OF FICTION
The truth tellers
Wow! Honourable mentions for the English and French luminaries in the truth tellers category. Defoe seems to take the chief position followed by the rest in no particular order Swift, Trollope, Borrow, W. E. Norris of course Maupassant is on that list too.
Truth itself, however unpleasant, is interesting always.
The Romantics
I am surprised Scott falls into this category. While I thiugh women were best placed to write emotional stuff…… I find this…….”The romantic novel realizes for us an emotion which is deep and genuine. Scott, Stevenson, Mrs. Radcliffe, all in their different ways, unveil another country of the land of fiction; and it is not the least proof of their power that they breed in us a keen desire for something different.”
The Character-Mongers and Comedians
Dickens comes at the very top of this…with characters in books like Bleak House
“Pride and Prejudice, one says, has form; Bleak House has not. The character-making power is so prodigious, indeed, that it has little need to make use of observation, and a great part of the delight of Dickens lies in the sense we have of wantoning with human beings twice or ten times their natural size of smallness who retain only enough human likeness to make us refer their feelings very broadly, not to our own, but to those of odd figures seen casually through the half-opened doors of public houses, lounging on quays, slinking mysteriously down little alleys which lie about Holborn and the Law Courts. We enter at once into the spirit of exaggeration.”
George Eliot has kept the engine of her clumsy and powerful mind at her own disposal. She can use it, when she has created enough matter to use it upon, freely.
But personal relations have limits, as Jane Austen seems to realize by stressing their comedy.
The Psychologists
But it is the measure of Henry James's greatness that he has given us so definite a world, so distinct and peculiar a beauty that we cannot rest satisfied but want to experiment further with these extraordinary perceptions, to understand more and more, but to be free from the perpetual tutelage of the author's presence, his arrangements, his anxieties.
For one thing, Henry James himself, the American, ill at ease for all his magnificent urbanity in a strange civilization, was an obstacle never perfectly assimilated even by the juices of his own art.
Proust, the product of the civilization which he describes, is so porous, so pliable, so perfectly receptive that we realize him only as an envelope, thin but elastic, which stretches wider and wider and serves not to enforce a view but to enclose a world. His whole universe is steeped in the light of intelligence.
Dostoevsky, we are startled by differences which for a time absorb all our attention. How positive the Russian is, in comparison with the Frenchman. He strikes out a character or a scene by the use of glaring oppositions which are left unbridged.
Honourable mentions - La Recherche du Temps perdu and The Possessed.

For me Granite and Rainbow is such a good collection of short stories that everyone should read. It re-emphasized the kind of books that Virginia Woolf used to read and I can tell you one thing for sure….the lady was a voracious reader. I am sitted here thinking and wishing she critiqued more and wrote more Biographies.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The BPL is killing me with the versions of the books they are giving me. This one was a first American printing in good shape. Why should I give this back?! NO ONE WILL LOVE IT LIKE ME!

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays were refreshing, a real pleasure to read. Those in the first half appealed to me most - Hours in a Library, Life and the Novelist, Women and Fiction, Phases of Fiction - but all held my interest. It's thrilling to commune with one of the great minds musing on the work of other writers. I'm in the midst of voraciously reading a wide variety of books, and Woolf counsels us to keep seeking out the best, because reading can be a spiritual experience:

But all our faculties are summoned to the task, as in the great moments of our own experience; and some consecration descends upon us from their hands which we return to life, feeling it more keenly and understanding it more deeply than before.

Woolf urges us to sustain the zest we felt when we seized the world in our early twenties:

For the first time, perhaps, all restrictions have been removed, we can read what we like; libraries are at our command, and, best of all, friends who find themselves in the same position. For days upon end we do nothing but read. It is a time of extraordinary excitement and exaltation. We seem to rush about recognizing heroes. There is a sort of wonderment in our mind that we ourselves are really doing this, and mixed with it an absurd arrogance and desire to show our familiarity with the greatest human beings who have ever lived in the world.

There are the recognitions, too, the shivers we live for, when the printed word stirs us deeply in ways other artforms cannot:

And it is significant that we recall this poetry, not as we recall it in verse, by the words, but by the scene. The prose remains casual and quiet enough so that to quote it is to do little or nothing to explain its effect. Often we have to go far back and read a chapter or more before we come by the impression of beauty or intensity that possessed us.

And lastly, there's that feeling all great works of art spark within receptive participants, the desire to live well enough to create something beautiful of one's own:

'By health', [Katherine Mansfield] wrote, 'I mean the power to lead a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love--the earth and the wonders thereof--the sea--the sun. . . . Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.'

If you've read and admired even one Woolf novel, I recommend one essay, a few, or all of them here. Virginia's voice will ring through the ages.

[Bengu Vahapoglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf, inanılmaz aydınlık ve duru bir akılla yazıyor denemeleri. Onun zihninden çıkan her bir düşünce pırıltısı akıl kamaştırıcı (:

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms Woolf can interchange between stream of consciousness prose poems (her novels) to concise and straightforward criticism in a way that is both natural and still manages to express her truly unique personal identity. This versatility is but one of many qualities that makes her an all-time great.

One doesnt always share the same taste as writers one loves but it is always interesting to see what one famous writer thinks of another. We get no shortage of examples in this volume: Hemingway, Poe, Whitman and Henry James stick out to me most and her comments on all are suuuuper worth reading.

Her comments on writing, and being a writer, are worth reading. As are those on supernatural and spooky stories. What's not to love?

Nothing to be afraid of here, and if you're skeptical about 300 pages of hyper-vivid impressions, start with her criticism. This and A Room of One's Own are essential to the genre. 🌸📚🌞

[Jasmine Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Phases of Fiction” is an astounding work of literary criticism that I hope to regularly reread for the rest of my life. The extended conceits Woolf employs throughout the first half of this collection are breathtaking in their detail, liveliness, and wit. Rarely do I pick up essays on other books or authors whom I have not read and find them engaging or illuminating; although I haven’t read much by the Brontës, Stevenson, or Defoe, she makes their novelistic tendencies stand for other things that deserve comment, so my gaps in reading are little matter.

Also, does anyone have further reading material to recommend on the life and legacy of Sir Walter Raleigh??

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every time I read Woolf’s essays I finish the book with the firm conclusion that she is among my favourite authors. Something about her writing is so easy to read, so captivating, insightful and somber. Her melancholy matches my own and her insight is detached and from afar which is also to my liking. The only reason for 4 stars instead of 5 stars were that I preferred her ‘common reader’ and had a week long break whilst reading this book as it got a little boring. Nonetheless, Woolf inspires me and my mind fills with praise each time I think of her.

[Ishan Vashi · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few essays that I really enjoyed, but they were mainly front-loaded in "The Art of Fiction" section (specifically "Hours in a Library," "The Narrow Bridge of Art," and "Life and the Novelist"). The first essay in the section on biography was pretty interesting, but as it moved into specific biographies rather than a theoretical discussion of biography as a form of writing, I got less interested.

[Olga Levitzki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Granite and Rainbow became my handbook for the writer’s craft, a kind of the guide to the beautiful world of literature. Virginia Woolf is a brilliant reviewer. The way she speaks about great authors is fascinating. It makes you want to read them right away, or if you already did, look at them from her angle. I would highly recommend this book to those who wants to become a good writer or those who needs a better understanding of English literature.

[Suzanne Fournier · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of articles Virgina Woolf wrote in the early 1900's, focused mostly around writing styles, reviews of books and types of literature.

At times wordy and abstract (as always) Woolf never fails to be interesting and enlightening. This volume brought to my attention several biographies I'd never heard of. I particularly enjoyed 'Women and Fiction'.

[ebbl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Virginia always. Her thoughts on writing, history, and society are compelling, although the biography section toward the end is staler.

[Luisa Fer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book wandering through the library. I still do that. It was in the lower shelf, hidden in a corner. A very old edition, its pages were yellow and the cover was a hideous blue, but I opened it in the most perfect page and I could not put it down.

I have problems with reading Virginia's fiction but her essays, her diaries, her mind I can't get enough of.

[Nathan Eilers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woolf is an astute critic, and this book shows off her analytical skills. I especially liked her short essay on Hemingway. All the pieces are thought-provoking.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only shelved because I misplaced it! It's around here somewhere.