“Dark Academia”
Book Choice for March 2021: Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.
Dear Readers,
It has been awhile. Oh, I’ve been wanting…but there just never was the right time. Then, a few minutes ago I was standing in my kitchen and I was like…now’s IT, now is the time. Just pour yourself a pinch of martini rosso, listen to poor Bruno the dog howling next door (really) and tell them. Tell them the story of your life so it exists.
I have now worked one month longer on a section then I had anticipated, on the revised Revised Schedule. And actually, not so long ago I thought I would be done Chapter 4 at the end of January, and now chapter 4 has 3 sections inside of it (oh, how they grow!) the first of which was finished last Friday. I’m not sure where my life is going (is anyone at this point in Covid?) and now it is May. May.
The lighthouse, the end of my journey, seems still very far off. Now that I have read 3 Virginia Woolf novels, her first three (the ones which seem to be lesser read) I can say with authority that she uses a LOT of water imagery for someone who writes about London. We are not talking riverine ecology here—she seems to think you can’t obtain internal development without crossing oceans. Well, she may have been right, come to think of it I personally can’t. So yes, now I have read The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922).
(Yes, I am reading her back catalog in order because I am a maniac).
It has just occurred to me, on the basis of the publication dates, that Jacob’s Room must have been Woolf’s pandemic novel. Did she sit, huddled over papers, in London, under stay-at-home orders? That’s an interesting coincidence. I started reading this book last year at some point, after the long, drawn out dullness that was Night and Day (such a good title, such boring characters) and I thought, at first, possibly because of what I had heard about it, and maybe also because it is about a man and I don’t find stories about men that interesting (oooh, that’s a very bad thing to say I know, but it probably only shows my lack of reading), nevertheless, I *thought* at first that Jacob’s room was a slog. And I put it down, half way.
Then, at some point in this molasses spring I picked it up again, and I started to like it a LOT. I mean, the descriptions…the writing…NOW I am starting to understand, as her stream-of-consciousness style develops in this third book, why the word “genius” occurs very frequently as an epithet of Virginia Woolf. Now I can’t wait to learn more. The sentences are singing, they are ALL epigrammatic polished jewels that I want to collect and keep forever. Someday I will buy another copy of Jacob’s Room (the one I have is in a very cheap edition bound together with Night and Day), and I’m going to keep it and read it again and again to find new perfect phrases. (I almost never find real keepers!) It’s lovely, possibly because Jacob also doesn’t matter—it’s about him, sure, but you don’t know him, you just see him. Like the beautiful object of a crushing love affair that never got off the ground, remaining perfect forever.
“It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by – this unseizable force.”
It consoles me to think, as I type away in obscurity, in a beautiful but unimportant town, that every day as I drink coffee and get dressed and eat snacks—-that I am living by an unseizable force.
There are many more interesting phrases than this in the book, but they build to crescendoes and would be very long to excerpt, I particularly like one about letters, that goes on for pages, following the journeys of letters through the world, specific letters, and then their general purpose, to keep our lives moving forward, and to trick us that our lives are moving forward. There are two things I like about this book very much: the immediacy, the whole sense of our lives as being breaths within a wind, and over very soon, but so important to us, individually, and the fact that the author speaks and surmises through giving inanimate objects feelings and watchfullness and, well, sort of checking in with them as unmoving touchstones to the scenes around them, which I like very much. I’ve often thought about life from our possession’s point of view–that you are off chasing your dreams and yet the cellar stair still creaks at your parent’s house thousands of miles away–and here is a book that does it all the time.
There is a third thing, also.
It is integral to the atmosphere of the book, but I will also be going on tanget here. Jacob’s Room is mostly the memoir (from outside of a person? is that possible?) of an early 20th century male who goes to university. It is, funnily enough, right in line with the trendiest of trends, “Dark Academia.” But I don’t think many of the people who make those “aesthetic” dark academia youtube videos know about this gem. I know, I know, I am late to the party even talking about “dark academia” now (what’s next, chatting about ‘cottagecore?’) however, people do seem to think that these are “lifestyles,” and we live, apparently, in a time where you “craft” a lifestyle and veneer over your life with it—-(and that is somehow meaningful? or it just looks good?) Yeah, the whole concept of these “aesthetics” rings very Late Capitalism to me.
But it wasn’t an “aesthetic” to Jacob, who lived at the last gasp of the British empire’s strength, and could spend his time debating philosophies and wearing nice trousers and impressing women at tea with his looks—but only engaging with men in terms of the mind. (That last theme –‘learning is restricted to upper class men’ is chimed again and again in all the Woolf I have read so far and of course it gnawed at her. What might she have had). Jacob was living the life that people are now romanticising and consciously copying. You know, the Western canon, old universities and ink dipping pens, latin….etcetera. Jacob goes on a tour of Greece (although one in which he can somehow see both the Piraeus and Marathon from the Acropolis—this was long before urban development I guess) and even he is caught between the symbols of past glories and his own doubts about whether any of this tradition really matters to the present, which is an interesting debate I can relate to as a person who threw her lot in with the Humanities long ago.
And “Dark Academia” as a trend does relate to my own past studies, particularly in the gap between what we ASPIRE to be, and what we actually DO. When I first heard about “Dark Academia” I thought “that’s fun” because it sounded like the things I have thought in the past are fun, but while I can understand dressing in a certain way, to present yourself a certain way and to like how you look, I am not sure that attempting to surround yourself with stuff that conjures an antique mood actually helps you be a better student. And that’s what I find so hollow I suppose, that its not really about becoming a better, wider-read, thoughtful scholar, it is swanning about in ruffles on instagram, intending to appear as such.
I can see that this “aesthetic” is being used by people younger than me, as a way to cope with and romanticise their tightly constrained lives and heavy academic workloads. The thing is—it probably means that on some level, they don’t want to do what they are doing, or not to the extent that they have to do it, to get good enough grades to get to university. There is so much pressure now. So they try and drum up a constant passion for their studies, by buying things and posing for photos—and I get it, but I just don’t think its going to work. (It might be possible to romanticise reading a lot of literature but less easy to invoke yearning feelings over a pack of neon anatomy flashcards, I imagine, or best practices in pharmaceutical lawsuits). I mean, all the power to adherents of the “Dark Academia” lifestyle, the existence of which underscores how little romance we sometimes find in our daily lives—but its not really about learning.
Jacob’s Room describes the British Library, St. Pauls, the Phaedrus, old perfumes, the quadrangle (every quadrangle), snifters, poetry, love that cannot be expressed due to the conventions of the time, a grand tour….yeah, the symbols of past grandeur are all there, and the “drama” is provided by in many other novels recently re-branded as “Dark Academia,” notably The Secret History, Dead Poet’s Society, and newer titles such as “We Were Villains” (all the plots involved follow this formula: 1. We Love Learning / Art, 2. Someone Dies). In about 2005 in a concrete block university I was obsessed with The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is a little bit about learning, but its mostly about privilege; I assume that what we are all actually craving is significance. I suspect, however, that significance is awarded to your life later, after it is over, if any trace remains of you in the literary/historical record. Then, suddenly, your having plugged away in some unimportant place becomes noble and inspiring (Kant never left Koenigsburg!) and people pilgrimage to your house, to see your pencils and imbibe your air and spirit; to be inspired. (Or, ya know, for the ‘gram).
If you knew my personal history, and my own pilgrimage to a great university which was very much inspired by its ancient aura and fame, you would say “certainly you should be the last to judge people play-acting with their lives” and you would be right. I can see COMPLETELY the reasons for this trend, at this time, people are sort of spiritually starving. It would be so wonderful to be able to believe in your artistic destiny—or at least revel in port and dissolute habits and ancient words and fine wool pants until one finds it. But, but but…these are the trappings. These things do not a writing life make—and I am saying this as much to myself as to anyone else. I wish the trappings worked, like talismans, to make sure one’s interest in a subject never wanes–but it will ebb and flow. Collecting pretty things does not mean that you will actually crack the books.
There is such a big difference between wanting to Be a Person Who Reads Greek (for example), and then actually memorizing all the verb charts, doing hours upon hours of translation homework each night, and getting to every Friday afternoon test, so that you actually Learn Greek. I have been guilty of the Aspiration over the Perspiration so many times. (Greek is so cool! But the getting of Greek is pain!)
I was recently reflecting, after a grueling race to actually, finally meet a deadline that I made myself—that other gifts come out of “A Writing Life©,” beyond being admired, beyond being included in the stream of tradition. There is keeping a promise to yourself. Being analytical, then being more analytical. Tough, sweating kinds of growth that are not romantic, and not prize-worthy. I have found—a perfect setting for academic “toil” is not necessary. I don’t actually need polished wood and marble busts, I can in fact work under florescent strip lighting. When I saw that DA was an “aesthetic” I was initially interested, but it didn’t seem to be “working,” I wasn’t actually more inspired by looking at pictures of old libraries on Pinterest. PDFs are way more convenient.
I’m grown past the idea of the ‘romance of scholarship.’
(What’s next? Actually obtaining competency in my chosen subject?)
It’s a bit weird to think that now I just have to finish my thesis, sans rose-petal vapour wafting around my head, and no more visions of greatness. Just visions of practicality that most people have been shoving on me the whole time, but which I have resisted. Well, I resist no more. It is what it is. Maybe we all have to grow up sometime.
Anyway, now that I have hammered that nail very far down, let’s move on. I just want you to know that I am not using Jacob’s Room as a safe place in which to hide from the modern world. I live in a concrete capsule like so many others and my role in society is currently indefinite. However, the language used in Jacob’s Room simply sparkles, Virginia Woolf noticed every mundane thing without having to turn it over into something gorgeous, or some “aesethetic,” it was just about the noticing. I mostly see the work involved in her prose now—you can let your eyes slide over some sentences, but you realize, in others, the absolute picking and re-picking of the seams that went on there. The tiny stitches (forgive the female metaphor)—if Jane Austen worked days engraving her “tiny pieces of ivory” Virginia Woolf also worked—damned hard. I still don’t really understand fiction, but I am at the beginning of understanding the work that goes on behind three good words strung in a row.
Postscript:
I do love books where nothing happens but people wake up and put on their clothes and a city continues to bulge and contract. And this means—since I meant to read a V. Woolf novel every year, that I will be caught up from 2020 and able to read “The Waves” this year, which I really, REALLY want to do, on a beach with the diss. handed in and all the tiny struggling details forgotten.