What do you think?
Rate this book
The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism
This study is a major reappraisal of Virginia Woolf's relationship to Bloomsbury and the aesthetic and philosophical developments of her time. Through extensive archival research, Ann Banfield offers the first full analysis of Woolf's engagement with the theories of a remarkable trinity of thinkers: G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Roger Fry.
452 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2000
5 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 10, 2021
In the midst of reading a book, review type observations crowd one's imagination all clamoring for outing at once. Upon finishing the book, however, one paradoxically finds no reviewing words at all. So, to relieve this sudden constipation, here, now one elects to keep some sort of running commentary on "The Phantom Table". Sentence one, Chapter One reads: "The universe of Virginia Woolf's novels is a monadology whose plurality of possible worlds includes points of space and time unobserved, unoccupied by any subject." Oh, WOW! And just this expresses the tidal force that pulls one toward the promise of a rolling intellectual adventure. One hears this opening line both as a very tight synopsis of Russelian philosophy, as a helpful account for the "Time Passes" section of "To the Lighthouse", as well as offering, at least for one, an epiphany that reveals the source of Banfield's own notion of the 'speaker- less sentence'. (Perhaps.)
For illeistic (referring to one's self in the third person) play, Grendel was ever game.
So, how is it with you? How do you find yourself self?
That's a tough one, let him make a call.
"Come you spirits that tend to mortal thoughts tell him what he must hear, fill him from crown to toe top with the geometries of dearest credulity, make thick his boundaries, open up access and passage to the excesses and persistence of the visible and invisible worlds."
Hear now, the reply of the secret spirits, the silent spirits; the phantom things that first splashed their tiniest atoms against the pendulous tubes of an Aeolian harp which then rippled out perceptual yet unseen waves of sound that said nothing, but, nonetheless, invited his attention. He listens. Responds. "Yes, of course. Hear. Then. He finds himself as a monad: a separate, single, isolated point of perspective. Call this point (the he-him), Grendel."
Welcome to another episode of Grendel's DED talks.
The pretense of this episode is to discuss Ann Banfield's, "The Phantom Table -Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism," This talk will, however, center on chapter six in Part Two titled "Principia Aesthetica". And, although questions of Distracting Existential Difficulties abound in Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" ( TL, Harvest Book, 1955)[For example, the question made hilariously famous by Douglas Adams in, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -you know, "what did it all mean?" (TL 159).]; it is, however, epistemological questions such as, "Can we know other minds?" and, perhaps more urgently, "How do we know anything at all?" that also flavor Woolf's novel.
Grendel sits at the baby grand found wedged into the clutter of his book-filled rooms at Crab Midge Moor. Hear then that here he tosses themes cut from Bruckner's symphonies into a steroid salad that clearly overwhelms the literary/philosophical themes that inspires his propose in playing them. For held in the piano's cradle are sheets not of music but of enlarged print pages taken from various chapters of "To the Lighthouse". Hastily overwritten editorial comments and suggestive titles fill their margins; for example, one caption reads, "Lily Painting" with arrows pointing to incidences found in Chapters 3 and 9, et al, in part three of "To the Lighthouse.
Turning from the piano to face the reader, Grendel leaps to his feet and bays his objection to the illeistic denial of self with such a towering soulful passion that all of Spain's Flamenco artist wept with envy, "I.........AM......Grendel". He smiled sweetly, then returned to the piano.
Now what?
Yes, a disclaimer; as I wear the pontificals of logicians and academics poorly, I will therefore shun the foreplay of well developed arguments to leap directly to my evaluation of Russell's logical 'musts', his 'geometries of dearest credulity'-his 'fearful symmetry'. And, what does this look like? It pictures the necessary relationship between word and world. It guarantees a knower's claim of knowing the world (d.b.a. reality). Roger Fry identifies the word and world aspects of this duality as 'granite' and 'rainbow'. Pause for a moment to consider Ahab's names for this duality: 'inscrutable malice' and 'paste board masks'. Both Ahab and Fry as well as Russell and the early Wittgenstein assert that any claim to know the world depends on acknowledging or in Russell's and Fry's case literally seeing- no matter how brief that vision might be- the formal granite-like entities of logic that inform hence legitimize any perceiver's claim to knowing the rainbow of colors, for example, that appearances manifest. Nice. In the dance world, some dance artists dismiss this sort of direct one to one meeting between music (word) and movement (world) as 'Mickey Mousing'. So, moving along in this current, let's re-phrase Ahab iconic question with, "Hast seen the white mouse? White because logical forms (structures, pictures, atoms, objects, the un-reducible, etc.etc.) are colorless. If so, then the white whale Ahab pursues may illustrate what Russell means by an 'acquaintance' with what the philosophers call the 'thing-in-itself.' This is impossible to do. Why? Recall Kant's claim that the 'thing in itself' is a numinous 'thing', and hence a 'thing' unknowable by humans, (And, Stanley Cavell said, "Thanks for nothing".) Russell's notion of 'acquaintance', in contrast, makes this numinous 'thing' palpable. In practice, according Rodger Fry, the Post-Impressionists go down this rabbit hole and Fry celebrates Paul Cezanne for his use of color to reveal such forms. (For Cezanne, the logical forms were the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.) And, Woolf's Lily Briscoe demonstrates how access and passage to these ever elusive forms obtains by frequently stepping back from her easel and squinting at her work.
[And here in this logical space somewhere between the points of thinking, knowing, guessing and (perhaps) creating, Grendel, by the hand of some chancy squint, of half-baked notions, of unsure inferences, of groundless claims to understanding was at once detached. So, here, now, by this happy happenstance of revelatory acquaintance-ship, Grendel may confidently 'Mickey Mouse'-es his words with his world; but, yet not his musical meeting with "To the Lighthouse"; for here he chose the music of Bruckner precisely because its radiant brass cords reach ever out to banish the sickly touch of the novel's existential worries. No Mickey Mouse-ing there.]
Detached: a monad: a sealed consciousness existing separately together with other sealed consciousnesses. Fortunately, in 'To the Lighthouse", the stark isolation of one's consciousness or mind didn't entail the solipsist's doubt of the existence of other minds, but rather focused on the inscrutability of other minds (particularly if considered from a single perspective). Get this: for Russell there are two types of perspective: the occupied (by a consciousness) and (the non-consciousness) unoccupied. In this way, 'sense data' (light, sound, etc. etc), which flows to each sort of perspective (these points of perspective are infinite in number) account, then, for the persistence of things. (Yes, Virginia, that means that falling trees do not require an audience to make noise. And, come to think of it neither does Beauty require a audience- wait, we see beauty so maybe we should say 'optience' or 'specience'. So, does this not-in-the-eye-of-the -beholder logic then render unto beauty palpability, hence, measurability, that is to say that it presents publicly available features? Oh, Wow! Consider, for example, the musings of Mr. Banks on the beauty of Mrs. Ramsay. His need to appeal to the Graces of Greek myth to account for her beauty suggests that the unknowable is just that unknowable; so then is Beauty a delightful nothing-ness?(TL 46-47 )) It is this notion of sense data's propagation and reception that sheds light, even if it is an August light, on James' response to Lily Briscoe's question about Mr. Ramsay's philosophy, "Think of a kitchen table... when you're not there." (TL 38) Sense-data is ever ready everywhere. No perceiver necessary. And it is from her want to write from this ego free perceiver-less points the Woolf renders the consciousnesses of her characters.
Enough. Enough.
One must read Banfield's book to see just how well Woolf 'shapes from the marble mass of philosophical opacity the slender form of an art' - a modified phrase sung buy von Aschenbach in Britten's opera "Death in Venice".
For illeistic (referring to one's self in the third person) play, Grendel was ever game.
So, how is it with you? How do you find yourself self?
That's a tough one, let him make a call.
"Come you spirits that tend to mortal thoughts tell him what he must hear, fill him from crown to toe top with the geometries of dearest credulity, make thick his boundaries, open up access and passage to the excesses and persistence of the visible and invisible worlds."
Hear now, the reply of the secret spirits, the silent spirits; the phantom things that first splashed their tiniest atoms against the pendulous tubes of an Aeolian harp which then rippled out perceptual yet unseen waves of sound that said nothing, but, nonetheless, invited his attention. He listens. Responds. "Yes, of course. Hear. Then. He finds himself as a monad: a separate, single, isolated point of perspective. Call this point (the he-him), Grendel."
Welcome to another episode of Grendel's DED talks.
The pretense of this episode is to discuss Ann Banfield's, "The Phantom Table -Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism," This talk will, however, center on chapter six in Part Two titled "Principia Aesthetica". And, although questions of Distracting Existential Difficulties abound in Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" ( TL, Harvest Book, 1955)[For example, the question made hilariously famous by Douglas Adams in, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -you know, "what did it all mean?" (TL 159).]; it is, however, epistemological questions such as, "Can we know other minds?" and, perhaps more urgently, "How do we know anything at all?" that also flavor Woolf's novel.
Grendel sits at the baby grand found wedged into the clutter of his book-filled rooms at Crab Midge Moor. Hear then that here he tosses themes cut from Bruckner's symphonies into a steroid salad that clearly overwhelms the literary/philosophical themes that inspires his propose in playing them. For held in the piano's cradle are sheets not of music but of enlarged print pages taken from various chapters of "To the Lighthouse". Hastily overwritten editorial comments and suggestive titles fill their margins; for example, one caption reads, "Lily Painting" with arrows pointing to incidences found in Chapters 3 and 9, et al, in part three of "To the Lighthouse.
Turning from the piano to face the reader, Grendel leaps to his feet and bays his objection to the illeistic denial of self with such a towering soulful passion that all of Spain's Flamenco artist wept with envy, "I.........AM......Grendel". He smiled sweetly, then returned to the piano.
Now what?
Yes, a disclaimer; as I wear the pontificals of logicians and academics poorly, I will therefore shun the foreplay of well developed arguments to leap directly to my evaluation of Russell's logical 'musts', his 'geometries of dearest credulity'-his 'fearful symmetry'. And, what does this look like? It pictures the necessary relationship between word and world. It guarantees a knower's claim of knowing the world (d.b.a. reality). Roger Fry identifies the word and world aspects of this duality as 'granite' and 'rainbow'. Pause for a moment to consider Ahab's names for this duality: 'inscrutable malice' and 'paste board masks'. Both Ahab and Fry as well as Russell and the early Wittgenstein assert that any claim to know the world depends on acknowledging or in Russell's and Fry's case literally seeing- no matter how brief that vision might be- the formal granite-like entities of logic that inform hence legitimize any perceiver's claim to knowing the rainbow of colors, for example, that appearances manifest. Nice. In the dance world, some dance artists dismiss this sort of direct one to one meeting between music (word) and movement (world) as 'Mickey Mousing'. So, moving along in this current, let's re-phrase Ahab iconic question with, "Hast seen the white mouse? White because logical forms (structures, pictures, atoms, objects, the un-reducible, etc.etc.) are colorless. If so, then the white whale Ahab pursues may illustrate what Russell means by an 'acquaintance' with what the philosophers call the 'thing-in-itself.' This is impossible to do. Why? Recall Kant's claim that the 'thing in itself' is a numinous 'thing', and hence a 'thing' unknowable by humans, (And, Stanley Cavell said, "Thanks for nothing".) Russell's notion of 'acquaintance', in contrast, makes this numinous 'thing' palpable. In practice, according Rodger Fry, the Post-Impressionists go down this rabbit hole and Fry celebrates Paul Cezanne for his use of color to reveal such forms. (For Cezanne, the logical forms were the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.) And, Woolf's Lily Briscoe demonstrates how access and passage to these ever elusive forms obtains by frequently stepping back from her easel and squinting at her work.
[And here in this logical space somewhere between the points of thinking, knowing, guessing and (perhaps) creating, Grendel, by the hand of some chancy squint, of half-baked notions, of unsure inferences, of groundless claims to understanding was at once detached. So, here, now, by this happy happenstance of revelatory acquaintance-ship, Grendel may confidently 'Mickey Mouse'-es his words with his world; but, yet not his musical meeting with "To the Lighthouse"; for here he chose the music of Bruckner precisely because its radiant brass cords reach ever out to banish the sickly touch of the novel's existential worries. No Mickey Mouse-ing there.]
Detached: a monad: a sealed consciousness existing separately together with other sealed consciousnesses. Fortunately, in 'To the Lighthouse", the stark isolation of one's consciousness or mind didn't entail the solipsist's doubt of the existence of other minds, but rather focused on the inscrutability of other minds (particularly if considered from a single perspective). Get this: for Russell there are two types of perspective: the occupied (by a consciousness) and (the non-consciousness) unoccupied. In this way, 'sense data' (light, sound, etc. etc), which flows to each sort of perspective (these points of perspective are infinite in number) account, then, for the persistence of things. (Yes, Virginia, that means that falling trees do not require an audience to make noise. And, come to think of it neither does Beauty require a audience- wait, we see beauty so maybe we should say 'optience' or 'specience'. So, does this not-in-the-eye-of-the -beholder logic then render unto beauty palpability, hence, measurability, that is to say that it presents publicly available features? Oh, Wow! Consider, for example, the musings of Mr. Banks on the beauty of Mrs. Ramsay. His need to appeal to the Graces of Greek myth to account for her beauty suggests that the unknowable is just that unknowable; so then is Beauty a delightful nothing-ness?(TL 46-47 )) It is this notion of sense data's propagation and reception that sheds light, even if it is an August light, on James' response to Lily Briscoe's question about Mr. Ramsay's philosophy, "Think of a kitchen table... when you're not there." (TL 38) Sense-data is ever ready everywhere. No perceiver necessary. And it is from her want to write from this ego free perceiver-less points the Woolf renders the consciousnesses of her characters.
Enough. Enough.
One must read Banfield's book to see just how well Woolf 'shapes from the marble mass of philosophical opacity the slender form of an art' - a modified phrase sung buy von Aschenbach in Britten's opera "Death in Venice".
December 5, 2016
Rather saturated at times in its prose; some of it feels clogged, and the most interesting points are sometimes lost in chapters. Not the best book about Woolf or Modernism by any means.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews